Sensors@claudiux: Add cpu power consumption tab

[fzamperin]

Applet name and maintainer

Sensors@claudiux @claudiux

What would you like to see?

@claudiux Thanks for this amazing Applet! Being using it for years!

I have a suggestion for a new Feature, I want to measure my CPU power consumption, I have a 13700K and I see that I can get the power consumption in Joules from: /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/*/energy_uj. At first I tried to tweak into lm_sensors to see if I can grab this value to make the Applet display it from sensors but it didn't work. Do you think we can work to make this happen? As of right now I just know about Raptor Lake consumption but I think other processors output the power different way.

Let me know if you find that this is interesting somehow. Thanks!

[claudiux]

@fzamperin
Thanks for your interesting PR.
On my computer, access to this data requires root rights (with sudo). Is there any other way to get it?

[fzamperin]

I was doing some research but so far didn't find a way to fetch it :/

[fzamperin]

@claudiux After doing an extensive search it's not possible to catch the value without sudo privilege. Can we work this around? I don't know exactly the architecture and environment about applets on cinnamon but I'm willing to help with the implementation.

Other tools like Turbostat only work with root privilegies also.

[claudiux]

All the solutions I envisage would create a safety problem. I prefer not to implement them. I'll keep thinking about it.

[fzamperin]

UPDATE

I was able to make this work without sudo, it uses this tool: https://github.com/intel/pcm

I ran a docker container using the pcm tool from intel and was able to fetch the values, so I created this dummy code just to test:

const { Message, Session } = imports.gi.Soup;

const session = new Session();
session.timeout = 2;
const url = 'http://localhost:9738/persecond/1';

function fetchCPUInformation() {
  const message = Message.new('GET', url);
  message.request_headers.append('Accept', 'application/json');
  const result = session.send_and_read(message, null);
  const data = result.get_data();
  const responseString = new TextDecoder('utf-8').decode(data);
  return JSON.parse(responseString);
}

function addWattageToTooltip(tooltips) {
  const result = fetchCPUInformation();
  let joules = result['Uncore Aggregate']['Uncore Counters']['Package Joules Consumed'];

  tooltips.push(`${joules} W`);
}

module.exports = {
  addWattageToTooltip
}

Then added it on the applets.js to see if it works, I'm just not quite sure if this works on other cpus like AMD or ARM

[claudiux]

@fzamperin +1!

Please create a PR including changes in .js scripts and in settings-schema.json.

[fzamperin]

@claudiux After a quick research, I saw that only Intel cpus are supported using the PCM tool, do you want me to create a PR only for Intel? And then we can see how to support AMD or ARM?

Let me know your thoughts.

[claudiux]

@fzamperin Yes, but please only display these options when PCM tools are available and usable.