Arch Linux

swamp_rabbit

Member

Registered: 2022-04-05

Posts: 27

Powertop appears to not do anything, and runs indefinitely.

I'm trying to improve my laptop's battery life on arch, and so I want to use powertop per the wiki. When I try to run powertop I get the following output:

#powertop --html=powerreport.html 
modprobe cpufreq_stats failedLoaded 0 prior measurements 
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop 
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only 
RAPL device for cpu 0 
RAPL Using PowerCap Sysfs : Domain Mask d 
RAPL device for cpu 0
RAPL Using PowerCap Sysfs : Domain Mask d
Devfreq not enabled 
glob returned GLOB_ABORTED 
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop 
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only 
Preparing to take measurements 

From here it just sits. I think I let it go for just over an hour before I interacted with the laptop again. I ran htop and the powertop process wasn't using any cpu. Additionally, a lot of programs would not open, i.e. firefox.

This probably wasn't smart do do, but nothing I did would kill the powertop process, so I shut off the laptop with the power button. I guess a secondary question would be how to escape from a situation like this without a hard reset.