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8.157. powertop

Updated powertop packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
PowerTOP is a tool to detect all the software components that make a computer consume more than necessary power when idle. PowerTOP can be used to reduce power usage by running various commands on the system.

Note

The powertop package has been upgraded to upstream version 2.3, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version including corrected handling of arbitrary interface names. Moreover, checks for usability of the ondemand governor have been added. Also, several changes have been made to enhance user experience and to simplify and improve power management profiling capabilities. (BZ#682378, BZ#697273, BZ#829800)

Bug Fix

BZ#998021
The default soft limit for per-process open file descriptors is 1024, and the default hard limit for per-process file descriptors is 4096. By using the performance counter subsystem, the PowerTOP tool could exceed the limit on complex systems. Consequently, an error message about missing kernel support for perf was displayed. This update adds a fix that temporarily increases both the soft and hard file descriptor limits for the current process to the kernel limit. If the kernel limit is still insufficient, PowerTOP now displays an error message indicating that the file descriptor limits should be manually increased.
Users of powertop are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.