fedora-meeting
LOGS

15:00:57 <pknirsch> #startmeeting
15:01:09 <pknirsch> #topic Power management for Fedora
15:01:32 <pknirsch> Good afternoon (and good morning ofc) everyone
15:01:57 <pknirsch> and welcome to the weekly power management meeting on #fedora-meeting
15:02:32 <pknirsch> I don't have a big agenda today, so probably won't be a very long meeting.
15:03:07 <pknirsch> #info Last weeks quick recap
15:03:19 <pknirsch> A quick recap for last weeks meeting:
15:03:47 <pknirsch> We went through the current Feature plan for F12: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PowerManagementF12
15:04:09 <pknirsch> explaining some of the points there in more detail
15:04:26 <pknirsch> and the moved to questions about tuned and ktune
15:04:50 <pknirsch> followed by questions about the graphics drivers power management features that are already in F122
15:04:58 <pknirsch> s/F122/F11/
15:06:32 <pknirsch> #info What is scomes?
15:06:47 <pknirsch> I'd like to talk about about scomes today and what it is.
15:06:56 <pknirsch> We've just recently added that to the tuned-utils package
15:08:04 <pknirsch> The idea behind it is to collect some relevant data about application execution which can to a certain degree be used to measure if any changes to the app itself or the system lets the app behave better or worse than before
15:08:39 <pknirsch> Like the netdevstat and diskdevstat this is again a systemtap script
15:09:02 <pknirsch> The statistics it collects are as follows:
15:09:25 <pknirsch> Monitored execname: my_binary_3d4f8
15:09:25 <pknirsch> Number of syscalls: 3716
15:09:25 <pknirsch> Kernel/Userspace ticks: 34/339
15:09:25 <pknirsch> Read/Written bytes: 446282
15:09:25 <pknirsch> Transmitted/Recived bytes: 16235
15:09:26 <pknirsch> Polling syscalls: 2
15:09:28 <pknirsch> SCORE: 4479767
15:10:58 <pknirsch> the score can be used to easily generally compare if the app behaves better or not now, as sometimes changes to the app/system changes one of the statistic values positively while another one is affected negatively
15:11:31 <pknirsch> the weights for that aren't set in stone but at the moment you'd need to tweak the script itself to change them
15:12:27 <pknirsch> it is especially helpful in absence of any other means for measurement, e.g. power consumption information or IPMI/ACPI data
15:12:45 <pknirsch> and doesn't require any special hardware
15:14:12 <drago01> why does the user have to tune anything?
15:14:16 <pknirsch> Petr Lautrbach did all the work on it, so if you got questions feel free to pop him an email :)
15:14:34 <drago01> shouldn't the stuff just work? (ie. automaticly set the best options)
15:14:37 <marcela> drago01: scomes is more for developer than user
15:14:48 <drago01> ok
15:14:53 <pknirsch> simple: some tweaks will affect the performance of the system but will allow more power saving.
15:15:32 <pknirsch> and the general rule for kernel and userland is to only enable things that won't affect the user experience and performance
15:17:05 <pknirsch> and yes, as marcela said, scomes it much more developer focused
15:17:57 <drago01> ok enabling everything that does not affect the user experience and performance by default makes sense
15:18:25 <pknirsch> aye
15:19:23 <pknirsch> and it can sometimes be useful to still be able to put the machine in an even more power saving state but if that affects performance or user experience it should require an active decision by the user
15:22:02 <pknirsch> #info Fedora 12 feature status
15:22:11 <pknirsch> next topic is the F12 feature status
15:22:48 <pknirsch> we haven't put a lot of things for F12 up as we'd like to focus more on stabilizing  things for F12
15:23:09 <pknirsch> The only things on the list at the moment are a few additions to tuned
15:23:30 <pknirsch> merging of ktune and tuned
15:23:45 <pknirsch> and a CLI to switch between different "profiles" for them.
15:24:11 <pknirsch> Regarding the documentation this will probably not make it as we'll need more time for that.
15:24:35 <pknirsch> The feature page for F12 can be found here:
15:24:42 <pknirsch> #info http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PowerManagementF12
15:25:21 <pknirsch> Currently a raw version of the CLI is in a branch for tuned (which is now an official hosted project on fh.org)
15:25:44 <pknirsch> #info https://fedorahosted.org/tuned/
15:26:10 <pknirsch> and i've just today finished the new cpu monitoring and tuning plugin
15:26:23 <pknirsch> and hope to get the disk tuning fixed tomorrow
15:27:11 <pknirsch> and i've found another thing we can do for disk tuning using ALPM, but i'll need to find a way to find the proper /sys entry for it for a specific drive
15:27:30 <pknirsch> as the drive itself doesn't seem to link to the corresponding host adapter in /sys :/
15:29:02 <pknirsch> But a new version of tuned should hit rawhide in the next few days with at least the most recent changes and additions
15:30:07 <marcela> Does the new version include ktune?
15:31:24 <pknirsch> I talked with Thomas about it, but he's neck deep in liblvm development at the moment, but next week definitely
15:31:38 <pknirsch> if not i'll just pull it in :)
15:32:00 <marcela> great
15:32:19 <pknirsch> we've talked quite a bit how we would do it, but we'd like to keep both initscripts separate actually
15:33:12 <pknirsch> as they both perform different tasks overall (one really starting a daemon, the other "only" changing system settings at start)
15:33:22 <pknirsch> what do you think marcela?
15:35:23 <marcela> then ktune could be in new package or subpackage of tuned.
15:35:33 <pknirsch> yes, thats the idea
15:37:53 <marcela> I'm ok with both choices.
15:38:05 <pknirsch> great :)
15:38:45 <pknirsch> switching profiles in ktune is dead simple, not sure if you have looked at the ktune code yet
15:39:24 <marcela> it's simple, but we don't have the profiles ;-)
15:39:37 <pknirsch> hehe, yea :)
15:39:41 <pknirsch> we got 2!
15:39:48 <marcela> someone has to find out which values should be used
15:39:54 <marcela> default and server mode? :)
15:40:26 <pknirsch> yea. i've already emailed the performance guys but haven't heard back from them yet
15:42:28 <pknirsch> how far  is the CLI btw, marcela? can we merge it with the main branch soon?
15:43:43 <marcela> I'd like to hear if that's what we need, or I should write something else. I have to push someone to look at it.
15:44:00 <wwoods> I don't want to derail the conversation, but.. I assume these things will ship with 3 default profiles? something like server, desktop, laptop?
15:44:14 <pknirsch> i took a quick look at it a few days ago and i wasn't sure how you'd like to support user made profiles
15:44:43 <marcela> pknirsch: good point
15:44:48 <marcela> I'll add it
15:47:38 <marcela> wwoods: that's the plan. But someone (probably Performance team) are/should collecting data.
15:48:59 <wwoods> interesting. thanks.
15:49:26 <pknirsch> that reminds me, we'll need to add a testplan for that for the fedora feature page, marcela
15:49:34 <pknirsch> so it can be tested during the F12 test days.
15:50:16 <marcela> I can create what will be testing
15:50:33 <marcela> and ask some QA about it
15:51:09 <pknirsch> great, cool :)
15:52:15 <pknirsch> i don't have anything more on my agenda. anything else to discuss?
15:55:07 <pknirsch> Alright, thats it then for today, see you all again next week!
15:55:14 <pknirsch> Thanks and have a nice day!
15:55:17 <pknirsch> #endmeeting