Powertop on RHEL5

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Hi all,

I'm trying to monitor power usage on my RHEL5.11 server. I have successfully installed powertop on my machine. But when I try to monitor the power usage it displays message :

No detailed statistics available; please enable the CONFIG_TIMER_STATS kernel option

But I cannot find kernel parameter named CONFIG_TIMER_STATS. I used sysctl -a to show configured kernel params
Has anyone ever used powertop on the RHEL machine?

Responses

This is a kernel compilation option.

You can see all the compilation options in /boot/config* however this option isn't there in RHEL5:

# egrep -c -H "CONFIG_TIMER_STATS" /boot/config*
/boot/config-2.6.18-402.el5:0

This option is there on RHEL6, and the y advises the RHEL6 kernel is compiled with this option enabled:

# egrep -H "CONFIG_TIMER_STATS" /boot/config*
/boot/config-2.6.32-504.12.2.el6.x86_64:CONFIG_TIMER_STATS=y

Checking the upstream Linux kernel, the timer_stats functionality was added during 2.6.20 (commit 82f67cd) so it doesn't look possible to use powertop on RHEL5, only on RHEL6 or later.

You could look into getting a power meter to plug inline with the power cable. I've worked in datacentres where we had network-enabled power rails and could monitor power usage of each power plug remotely.

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