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IZhen
Asked: 2010-09-10 03:23:37 +0800 CST

How to mearsure the average cpu frequency in linux?

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I'm trying to measure the average cpu frequency in an DVFS enabled cpu for specific interval , the obvious way of periodically sampling /proc/cpuinfo has very large variants. The cpufreq-stats driver gave me some hope ,e.g. 

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/stats/time_in_state 
2600000 118148
2000000 8562
1600000 11041
1200000 3428602    # lots of ticks is idle ticks

but unfortunately it is mixed with idle ticks(see patch "Do not account for idle time when tracking time_in_state"). During idle time it is probable that cpu will fall back to the lowest frequency ,thus skew the frequency distribution significantly .

The patch above utilize the account_idle_tick function to remove the idle ticks from statics, but it seems only works for xen kernel. Is there alternative way to measure average cpu frequency?

central-processing-unit linux electrical-power frequency

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The new development version Sysstat 9.1.6 includes a new option (-m FREQ) to report average cpu frequency ,e.g. 

    $ sar -m FREQ -P ALL 0
Linux 2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11.i686.PAE (palmer.localdomain)     10/23/2010     _i686_        (2 CPU)

02:36:09 PM     CPU   wghMHz
02:36:09 PM     all   1042.23
02:36:09 PM       0   1039.43
02:36:09 PM       1   1166.65

    The average weight is the time spent in that frequency , for example in a 10 second reporting interval , first 8 seconds the frequency is in 1GHz, the last 2 seconds is in 2GHz, then the average frequency 1.2 GHz

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  2. perhaps sar is what you are looking for. As of release 9.0.0 of sysstat, sar can collect the cpu frequency. From man sar: 

    -m     Report  power management statistics.  Note that these statistics
       depend on sadc option "-S POWER" to be collected.  The following
       value is displayed:

       MHz
         CPU clock frequency in MHz.
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