Hi! On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 11:14:16AM +0200, f.janczuk wrote: > I'm trying to make a small router/firewall running with OpenBSD but before > setting up this I want to know her electric consummation. > > I have recently discover a linux software whose name is: powertop. > This program can show watt power consummation (it's a ACPI estimation) but I > don't find it in OpenBSD's ports, > > Do you know equivalent or other solutions (Maybe sysctl sensor) ? >
on the software side, OpenBSD is the best choice if you want to use an environmentally friendly operating system: - the support for power management with APM is excellent, just have a look at the apmd(8) "-C" option for the cool running performance adjustment mode and all the other features that just work. - gwk@ and other developers did a lot of work to support the serperf feature on more CPUs. - ACPI support is getting better, power management is almost working, for example with acpicpu(4). - ... OK, these features are probably more or less existing in other operating systems as well, but OpenBSD is the best choice for "life earth" for many other reasons: - the source tree is very clean and small and we're trying hard to remove old and unused code. this reduces wasted CPU cycles, bandwidth, and storage. the impact is very big especially if you sum-up all the users, mirrors, cvs checkouts, OpenBSD compile farms, etc.. for example, we removed obsolete protcols like ipx and netiso and other ones in the past. - or - - downloading and compiling linux with all the bloat and dead and code will increase the global warming! even a tool like "powertop" will not prevent this. - OpenBSD's packet filter is very fast and it is even faster since the c2k7 hackathon because henning@ mcbride@ and others removed many unneccessary CPU cycles. this wastes less energy and is better for the environment... - there is active work to support bigger filesystems and volumes, for example the recent changes to update the disklabels and to include ffs2 support in OpenBSD. this will allow to use more storage with less hardware (eg. by using huge harddisks in a single server instead of many many file servers). less power for a megabyte. - other developers like art@ are doing a lot of magique in the kernel to improve the performance and to reduce the power consumption. - OpenBSD is free of BLOBs, the binary objects as provided by many bad vendors. nobody knows what really happens in the BLOBs and the work to reverse-engineer at least a few of them showed that they're burning a lot energy with a horrible mess of overcomplicated code. - it is an OpenBSD thing that many developers are active hikers, for example in the amazing wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. the local albertians like beck@ and deraadt@ told us a lot about behaving correctly in this protected environment. sadly enough, i've seen melting glaciers in the rockies that start to disappear :( - ... reyk
