powertop - Man Page

a power consumption and power management diagnosis tool.

Examples (TL;DR)

Calibrate power usage measurements: sudo powertop --calibrate
Generate HTML power usage report in the current directory: sudo powertop --html=power_report.html
Tune to optimal settings: sudo powertop --auto-tune
Generate a report for a specified number of seconds (instead of 20 by default): sudo powertop --time=5

powertop is a program that helps to diagnose various issues with power consumption and power management. It also has an interactive mode allowing one to experiment with various power management settings. When invoking powertop without arguments powertop starts in interactive mode.

Options

--auto-tune: Set all tunable options to their good setting without interaction.
-c, --calibrate: Runs powertop in calibration mode. When running on battery, powertop can track power consumption as well as system activity. When there are enough measurements, powertop can start to report power estimates. One can get more accurate estimates by using this option to enable a calibration cycle. This will cycle through various display levels and USB device activities and workloads.
-C, --csv[=filename]: Generate a CSV report. If a filename is not specified then the default name powertop.csv is used. The CSV report can be used for reporting and data analysis.
--debug: Run in debug mode.
--extech=devnode: Use the Extech Power Analyzer for measurements. This allows one to specify the serial device node of the serial to USB adaptor connecting to the Extech Power Analyzer, for example /dev/ttyUSB0.
-r, --html[=filename]: Generate an HTML report. If a filename is not specified then the default name powertop.html is used. The HTML report can be sent to others to help diagnose power issues.
-i, --iteration[=iterations]: Number of times to run each test.
-q, --quiet: Suppress stderr output.
-t, --time[=seconds]: Generate a report for a specified number of seconds.
-w, --workload[=workload]: Execute workload file as a part of calibration before making a report.
-V, --version: Print version information and exit.
-h, --help: Show the help message and exit.

Commands

In interactive mode, the following key bindings are available:

Tab	Show next tab
BackTab	Show previous tab
Right Arrow	Scroll to the right
Left Arrow	Scroll to the left
Up Arrow, PageUp	Scroll up or select previous item
Down Arrow, PageDown	Scroll down or select next item
Space, Return	Activate current item
s	Set refresh timeout
r	Refresh window
q, Ctrl-C, Escape	Exit powertop