Update on Miserware Beta – Power Saving on Linux
It’s well over a week now since I started using the Miserware MicroMiser software. I have it installed on all the Ubuntu PCs we have at home and on two laptops too. I have noticed no adverse effects from running the software. In fact you really do forget it is there. (The Micromiser software is packaged and available for easy install on Debian and it’s many derivatives, Fedora, RHEL, and SLES too so you are not limited to just Ubuntu’s Linux)
When I’m travelling around London (as I did quite a bit this week) I tend to take my 10″ webbook netbook device as it is lightweight and easy to cart around. For comms, I have a 3G dongle that gives me Internet access from virtually anywhere. [Ask Daviey just how handy that was the other day 
]
Now, this is by no means a scientific result and I haven’t had time to actually do a proper comparison with and without the Miserware code, but I reckon I’m getting around 30mins more life from the battery since running the Micromiser software. Before installing the code I was getting between an hour to an hour and a half or so of battery life, so I guess that that would equate to an average improvement of around a third.
Those 3G devices get really hot after being on for an hour! They make a really nice hand warmer in the winter though My lappy is running Ubuntu 9.04 desktop.
The Beta trial is still active and running and Miserware are very happy to have more subscribers sign-up. So If you would like an invite, leave a comment here and I’ll get on it asap.
One point that came up from a couple of people who were interested in taking part in the trial was to do with some restrictions on what you could say publicly about your observations. I am happy to say that Miserware have updated the license to be a little clearer and allow for more information disclosure. Here’s the text of the mail (with obfuscated email address) I received regarding the changes:
Dear MicroMiser beta participant,
Thank you for your involvement in the MicroMiser beta! The response so far has been tremendous and well beyond our expectations. The information we are getting when you run the mw-feedback script is really helping us improve our products and documentation.
The license you agreed to when registering for the beta said you needed permission from MiserWare to publish data reported by our software. We would like to lift this requirement to some extent by allowing you to share performance and power numbers reported by MicroMiser. More precisely our lawyers told us to say it like this:
“You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report.”
This includes any information (including energy savings information) provided by MicroMiser in any of its log files and/or information reported in tools such as the mw-feedback script which reports system specific information to MiserWare thereby aiding future development and earning you points in the incentive program.
Several folks have asked about benchmarking against other power management software. With regard to benchmarking, we want to clarify the intent of the license. Our intent was not to preclude benchmarking altogether, but to ensure the measurement methodology is fair to all parties. More precisely, our lawyers told us to paste both permissions together:
“You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, (i) provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report, or (ii) provided that such information is obtained using techniques approved in writing by MiserWare.”
There is no need for you to sign another license agreement as these clarifications simply give you additional permissions under the original license.
These clarifications are the result of your feedback. Please continue to send your comments to f–db–k at miserware dot com . We promise to keep listening.
Regards,
MiserWare
So, if you want to help these guys with their Beta, and get on the incentive program too (I’ve just won and received a really cool green iPod Nano) simply leave me a short comment below.
New Thoughts on the UK Government Open Source Action Plan
Remember when, back in late February, the Cabinet Office released their “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan”? Myself and many other FOSS commentators were obviously heartily encouraged and have talked about it and examined the policy in some detail.
I was going back over the document recently and something quite important struck me that I had missed completely the first time round; there is a distinct lack of consideration for one particular group of “stakeholders”. A particular group of very important stakeholders that should be one of the key beneficiaries of the whole policy.
Can you guess who I mean yet?
You.
Yes, the tax paying public. The group that actually consumes the services and output of Government. The group that pays the bills. The group that needs and should be guaranteed free and open access to public information; especially now after the recent ‘expenses revelations’.
Yet, reviewing the policy as a whole it seems remarkably introspective. Only examining how FOSS should or could be acquired and used within Government for Government. And it really only discusses the expectations and implications of increased use of FOSS for itself alone. It is as if the Government are acting only for themselves. <sarcasm>Surely not?</sarcasm>.
The key objectives will be to:
- ensure that the Government adopts open standards and uses these to communicate with the citizens and businesses that have adopted open source solutions
- ensure that open source solutions are considered properly and, where they deliver best value for money (taking into account other advantages, such as re–use and flexibility) are selected for Government business solutions.
- strengthen the skills, experience and capabilities within Government and in its suppliers to use open source to greatest advantage.
- embed an ‘open source’ culture of sharing, re–use and collaborative development across Government and its suppliers, building on the re–use policies and processes already agreed within the CIO Council, and in doing so seek to stimulate innovation, reduce cost and risk, and improve speed to market.
- ensure that there are no procedural barriers to the adoption of open source products within government, paying particular regard to the different business models and supply chain relationships involved.
- ensure that systems integrators and proprietary software suppliers demonstrate the same flexibility and ability to re–use their solutions and products as is inherent in open source.
Even the first objective above targets only those consumers that have already adopted FOSS solutions themselves. There is very little (and I’m being generous) mention or apparent consideration of the public citizen and the benefits that adopting Open Standards/Open Source will bring in terms of ability to access information without needing to acquire proprietary software to do so. There should, IMHO, be another “spoke” to the Government’s policy that provides for a basic level of education of these benefits to the public in general and the public sector employee too.
In my company we tend to meet and deal with individuals who are quite well-informed and will have (at least) a basic understanding of FOSS. They have probably heard of OpenOffice.org for example. But if you were to have that kind of conversation outside of the IT sector you will often be met with blank stares or gasps of “But how can it be free?” or “What’s the catch?”. It is these people who need to be contacted and helped so they may make an informed choice about the software they use on their home computers. Today many do not know they even have a choice (try asking you neighbours if they have heard of Ubuntu). It is – the way I see it – the responsibility of our Government to provide some base-level of information; the proprietary software vendors won’t pay to advertise FOSS and, to be totally honest, I don’t really see why they should be forced to in a free market.
You might think to suggest that is up to companies like ours to do this promotion. And we do to the best of our ability and as finances will allow. But, like many others, we are not a large company and do not have hundreds of thousands of pounds or more to spend on that kind of education. In fact, I was contacted last week by someone working “on behalf” of the Cabinet Office and a publication that is destined to go to all Local Government departments around the UK to help spread the word about the new policy and action plan. We were asked initially what we did and then if we would be interested in being included in this government sponsored and distributed “book”. It sounded very interesting. Until that was, they said it was going to cost us £4000 to have our company details in this register for just 6 months!
That hardly sounds like an “inclusive” and helpful exercise does it? Who are they going to get paying that kind of money? Just how much does this “book” actually cost to produce? And how many copies will be printed? And why are they still using books and paper anyway? It’s contents will almost certainly be out-of-date before it even gets distributed. Sheesh.
There is still, clearly, a very long way to go before our Government really starts to “get it”…
If John Suffolk or any other Government (or opposition) policy makers would like to discuss these issues further and hear how we think we could help to get the “message” out in a more inclusive, effective and less expensive way, please get in touch with us via our company web site. I have tagged this article with the requisite #ukgovOSS so I am hopeful that it will be picked up.
The Open Sourcerer on WordPress
I’m quite chuffed!
If you recall I changed the look of this site last week after building my first WordPress theme.
A passer by called Kirrus suggested I submit it to the WordPress Theme Directory. Which I thought was a cracking idea and one that hadn’t even crossed my mind. I sent it in, a few days later I got an email suggesting I made a couple of minor alterations:
- Add a Feed Autodiscovery to the header (good idea and something I wasn’t actually familiar with)
- Add some “default” widgets to the sidebar so on a blank WP instance you get to see some widgets in the sidebar.
So I did that this morning and submitted version 1.2. Only a few hours later I got a mail saying it had been accepted and is now in the WordPress Theme Directory!
Yippee!!!
I guess, I should ask that if you use the Theme Directory at all, it would be great if you could vote but that’s your choice.
Over 65% Power Reduction on my Ubuntu Server!
Wow!
I started using the Beta MicroMiser software this morning. I have installed it on the following interesting computers at my home. (They all run Ubuntu. The server is on 8.10 Server edition the others are on 9.04 desktop all 32bit):
- Lobsang – Desktop PC Intel Core2 8400,
- Angua – Laptop PC Intel Core2 Mobile T5500,
- Vimes – Home Server VIA C7
I checked with MiserWare that they were OK for me to report some of the stats and they said it was OK. So, if you run the daemon on your machines, look in /var/log/syslog for lines like the following.
Lobsang reports about once per hour with:
May 13 17:09:32 Lobsang micromiser[7571]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.100145kWh (20.70%)
May 13 18:09:32 Lobsang micromiser[7571]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.104223kWh (19.07%)
which is not bad. It’s a fairly hungry processor so ~20% saving is certainly not to be sniffed at.
Angua reports :
May 13 19:05:51 Angua micromiser[2496]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.000124kWh (33.9%)
Which is even better percentage-wise and means my battery should last a bit longer when I am out and about.
And finally Vimes, my server that is on 24/7 reports:
May 13 17:12:35 vimes micromiser[14718]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.315464kWh (65.19%)
May 13 18:12:35 vimes micromiser[14718]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.356811kWh (65.26%)
Which is pretty astonishing frankly. Now these figures are for just the processor but even so, that VIA C7 is described as drawing about 7W under normal load. If I have more than halved that over the lifetime of the device this will not be insignificant.
Really fascinating stuff.
If you want to try this at home on your computers, please leave a comment below and I will send you an invite. The trial runs until the end of June.
Power Saving Software for Linux
My friend Alan sent me an invitation to sign up for a beta trial of MiserWare‘s MicroMiser power saving software.
MiserWare MicroMiser is an intelligent software power management solution for x86 servers, laptops, and PCs running Linux. MicroMiser automatically optimizes a system to use energy more efficiently without compromising performance or availability. The MicroMiser Power Management Daemon (see below) when installed on a server, laptop, or PC, matches the energy consumed by the system to the load on the system automatically. MicroMiser typically lowers total system energy use by 10-35% even when a system is 100% utilized. MicroMiser also tracks the energy saved for use in estimating cost savings and carbon emission reductions.
I have installed it on 4 PCs so far and all seems to be fine. Installation is very simple as the download is in a deb or rpm package.
I am especially interested to monitor any battery-life performance improvements on my laptop computers and any savings to my always-on–home-server will be most appreciated. The site has downloads for most of the recent Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, and SLES distributions.
It appears to work on VIA C7 chips, and Intel Core2 8X00 and mobile T5000 series. Well, it does for me.
As you can see above, the company claim between 10 and 35% power savings with this software which is definately not to be sneezed at in these frugal times.
If you would like to take part in the beta, leave a comment below (I need your email address, which is not shown if you just fill in the comment form boxes) and I will endeavour to get you an invite.
Ubuntu One
Our friends at Canonical have been busy working on a new software as a service offering called Ubuntu One. This news was broken today by the VAR guy, but we thought we would dig a little deeper into what it is all about. Ubuntu One is in short a utility for synchronising stuff between desktop computers running the favourite operating system of you and me. The home URL of the service is https://ubuntuone.com/ and if you go there it will add your launchpad account to the list of people who want to join the beta. The Installation page guides you through downloading a little .deb file which adds a private PPA (yes if you expand the acronym that is a double private - it is at private-ppa.launchpad.net) to your sources.list, from then on you can install ubuntuone-client with apt or synaptic. This installs the application, but as it is a web service you need to be in the beta to get much further.
Digging about in the PPA reveals the source tar.gz in which we can learn a bit more. Firstly it is a GPL3 licensed python application. In the doc area is a very nice little schematic describing the connect and sync process:
The rest is just lots of code and it is probably best to wait for it to run to see what it does. I will leave you with this fragment from a main.py deep in the tree because it made me smile:
self.logger.debug("I can't attain Nirvana yet."
" [state: %s; queues:"
" metadata: %d; content: %d; hash: %d]"
% (self.state.name,
len(self.action_q.meta_queue),
len(self.action_q.content_queue),
len(self.hash_q)))
return
self.logger.debug("Nirvana reached!! I'm a Buddha")We are looking forward to playing with this one in more detail.
