PowerTOP & Gtk
Last week I populated the ptop-gtk repository, which holds a Gtk based interface for PowerTOP I've been developing over the last couple of months on my spare time. This new interface is enabled with the -G command line option, and it accepts all the existing options.
The motivation for the new interface is quite simple: increase the density of information displayed to the user. The current curses based interface is very limiting as far as that goes - not to mention a pita to maintain. Yes, it looks pretty, but looks aren't everything ;). I personally think we can take a few generally simple steps with various tools to enhance user experience.
The first tab simply shows what you already get with the current interface, allowing more information than the latter. The second tab displays moving area graphs for idle and frequency states, and a graph for the event report.
A couple of screenshots:
This is still in early development, I've been pushing it along as time allows. I'm writing a Gtk widget for periodic graphs, which is extended by another widget for DTrace based graphs. These widgets allow a very simple plug and play into DTrace consumers, just instantiate one, point the it to the data and it will do the job.
There a number of simple bugs that need to be fixed, but it's a relatively good start. I don't know when it will be ready for putback into snv, like I said, it needs work and it's not a very high priority at the moment. On the same subject, I'm not sure Gtk should be a dependency for ON builds, maybe the right place for this is in another consolidation. I don't know yet.
As always, questions/comments/suggestions are more than welcome.
Enjoy !
An important suggestion for the graphical mode. The C- and P- state graphs can be overlaid on the same graph, using the background colour for C- state as now, and a line graph in the foreground for P- state, proportional to frequency.
This has two important consequences, that you should establish and maintain: the P- and C- graphs can be directly correlated on the same time-scale, and this combined graph can then be shown with the same time-scale as the events graph below.
Posted by uep on July 27, 2009 at 06:18 PM PDT #
This is great news for anyone getting tired of the curses interface. I'm especially looking forward to the generic DTrace graph widget. I urge you to take a look at the very sexy new graphs by Karl Lattimer in gnome-system-monitor, because I think they would provide the best possible visuals for the graph widgets.
Wishful thinking: It might make sense for the powertop graphs to be integrated directly into gnome-system-monitor, but I suspect the latter isn't modular enough for that to be done easily.
Posted by Albert Lee on August 23, 2009 at 02:59 PM PDT #