Overview
Intel® SoC Watch is a command line tool for monitoring system power consumption on Intel platforms. The tool monitors active and low power states residencies for the following:
- CPU
- GPU
- Devices
- Processor frequencies and throttling reasons
- Thermals
- Wakeups
- Other various metrics
This monitoring provides an outlook of the energy efficiency of the target system.
Intel SoC Watch collects the data from both hardware and OS sources at the occurring OS context-switch points. This avoids perturbing the system sleep states and keeps the overhead to a minimum. The tool summarizes reports in a comma separated values (CSV) file format at the end of collection on the target device. You can instruct Intel SoC Watch to output reports to be imported into Intel® VTune Amplifier or to time trace files, which are viewed as timelines with tools such as Microsoft* Excel.
This tutorial walks you through the process of using Intel SoC Watch to analyze the system power consumption on Celadon.
Set up Intel SoC Watch
Download and Install Intel® System Studio
Intel SoC Watch is distributed as part of Intel System Studio. If you are new to Intel System Studio, click the Download page at Intel System Studio website to acquire a free renewable commercial license for 90-day use.
Register yourself at the product download page and a product activation code will be sent to the registered email address. Follow the on-screen instructions, select Linux and Android as the development and target operating systems respectively. This will start the Intel System Studio release package download.
Extract the release package and launch the installer install.sh. The installer will guide you through the installation process. The Intel SoC Watch package is available in the following directory after installation:
<ISS_Install_Root>/system_studio_2018/energy_profiler_and_socwatch/socwatch_for_target/socwatch_android_v2.5.0.tar.gz
Build Intel SoC Watch Kernel Modules
Extract the Intel SoC Watch package in the Linux development host, which pulled the source code from Celadon software repositories. This is necessary because you will build the Intel SoC Watch kernel modules against the Celadon kernel source code. Note that Intel SoC Watch depends on specific OS configurations and hardware capabilities. Reference the Release Notes of the Intel SoC Watch release package to ensure the required dependencies are met, or the SoC Watch might not work properly.
You MUST build the Intel SoC Watch kernel modules after completely building the Celadon installer image. This is required because the Celadon kernel is signed, and the Intel SoC Watch kernel modules must be signed with the same keys in order to load into the Celadon kernel.
Invoke the build_drivers.sh script and specify the full paths to the kernel source tree and the sign-file in order to build the kernel modules. The Intel SoC Watch kernel modules socwatch2_4.ko and socperf2_0.ko are generated in the drivers/ directory.
$ tar zxvf socwatch_android_v2.5.0.tar.gz
...
$ cd socwatch_android_v2.5.0
$ ./build_drivers.sh -l \
-k <celadon_src>/out/target/product/celadon/obj/kernel/ \
-s <celadon_src>/out/target/product/celadon/obj/kernel/scripts/sign-file
Set up Intel SoC Watch Watch on Intel NUC
An adb session from the Linux development host to the Intel NUC is required to set up Intel SoC Watch on the Intel NUC target system. Celadon enables adb over Ethernet to communicate to Intel NUC through WiFi or wired connections. Connect the Intel NUC to the same network as the Linux host and enter the following commands on the Linux host to connect to the Intel NUC:
$ adb kill-server
$ adb connect 192.168.1.107
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
connected to 192.168.1.107:5555
The installation of Intel SoC Watch software requires root permission. The following commands restart the adb daemon in privileged mode and re-connects to the Intel NUC:
$ adb root
restarting adbd as root
$ adb connect 192.168.1.107
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
connected to 192.168.1.107:5555
Run the socwatch_android_install.sh script in the directory where you extracted the Intel SoC Watch package. The script will push the software to the /data/socwatch directory on the Intel NUC.
$ ./socwatch_android_install.sh
adbd is already running as root
Using ADB_CMD = adb wait-for-device
Using TARGET_DIR = /data/socwatch
Told to create dir /data/socwatch
Copying socwatch to /data/socwatch
socwatch: 1 file pushed. 0.7 MB/s (1833776 bytes in 2.649s)
Copying setup_socwatch_env.sh to /data/socwatch
setup_socwatch_env.sh: 1 file pushed. 0.4 MB/s (3587 bytes in 0.008s)
Copying configs to /data/socwatch/configs/
configs/: 1 file pushed. 0.6 MB/s (203232 bytes in 0.332s)
Copying output_configs to /data/socwatch/output_configs/
output_configs/: 34 files pushed. 0.3 MB/s (87740 bytes in 0.286s)
Copying plugins to /data/socwatch/plugins/
plugins/: 1 file pushed. 0.6 MB/s (3741800 bytes in 6.067s)
Copying valleyview_soc to /data/socwatch/valleyview_soc/
valleyview_soc/: 9 files pushed. 0.5 MB/s (55924 bytes in 0.112s)
Copying cherryview_soc to /data/socwatch/cherryview_soc/
cherryview_soc/: 9 files pushed. 0.5 MB/s (94765 bytes in 0.186s)
Copying anniedale_soc to /data/socwatch/anniedale_soc/
anniedale_soc/: 9 files pushed. 0.5 MB/s (89393 bytes in 0.171s)
Copying tangier_soc to /data/socwatch/tangier_soc/
tangier_soc/: 8 files pushed. 0.4 MB/s (44441 bytes in 0.111s)
Copying libs to /data/socwatch/libs/
libs/: 6 files pushed. 0.6 MB/s (1482088 bytes in 2.323s)
Changing file perms for "socwatch"
All done.
To complete the setup, push the kernel modules that you built in the previous section to Intel NUC.
$ adb push drivers/socwatch2_4.ko /data/socwatch
drivers/socwatch2_4.ko: 1 file pushed. 0.5 MB/s (129918 bytes in 0.243s)
$ adb push drivers/socperf2_0.ko /data/socwatch
drivers/socperf2_0.ko: 1 file pushed. 0.5 MB/s (56990 bytes in 0.113s)
Collect System Power Metrics
Load Intel SoC Watch Kernel Modules
Establish an adb session to the Intel NUC, enter the Android command line shell, and load the Intel SoC Watch kernel modules with the following commands. For Intel platforms powered by the Intel Atom processor family, you must load the socperf kernel module before the socwatch kernel module.
$ adb shell
celadon:/ # cd /data/socwatch
celadon:/data/socwatch # insmod socperf2_0.ko
celadon:/data/socwatch # insmod socwatch2_4.ko
Collect Power Metrics
Set up the collection environment with the setup_socwatch_env.sh script. Now, you can start collecting the power consumption data and other metrics with the socwatch command. For example, the following commands capture the CPU C-state data on Intel NUC in 20 seconds. The collected data is stored as a results.csv file and other formats, depending on the given parameters. Reference the Intel SoC Watch for Google Android OS and Linux OS Users Guide for more information on the command line parameters, supported feature names, and examples using Intel SoC Watch for energy analysis collection.
celadon:/data/socwatch # source setup_socwatch_env.sh
Checking to see if we need to run ANN specific commands to enable socperf metrics...
OK, commands not needed.
Done.
Using SOCWATCH_BASE_DIR = /data/socwatch
Using SOCPERF_BASE_DIR = /data/socwatch
If you haven't loaded the drivers yet, please do so.
Check the user guide to determine which drivers to
load, and the order in which to load them.
celadon:/data/socwatch # ./socwatch -t 20 \
-m -f cpu-cstate \
-o results -r int -r json
*** Started 20 seconds data collection. Use Ctrl-C to stop collection.
*** Post-processing results.
*** Data written to: ./results
You can download the Intel SoC Watch output files to the development host for further analysis. An example output is shown in the following spreadsheet. Reference the Interpreting Energy Analysis Data with Intel® VTune Amplifier application note for examples of visualizing the collected data using Intel VTune Amplifier.
$ adb pull /data/socwatch/results.csv
/data/socwatch/results.csv: 1 file pulled. 0.5 MB/s (10737 bytes in 0.022s)
