Issued:
2013-11-20
Updated:
2013-11-20

RHBA-2013:1575 - powertop bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

powertop bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated powertop packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

PowerTOP is a tool to detect all the software components that make a computer consume more than necessary power when idle. PowerTOP can be used to reduce power usage by running various commands on the system.

The powertop package has been upgraded to upstream version 2.3, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version including corrected handling of arbitrary interface names. Moreover, checks for usability of the ondemand governor have been added. Also, several changes have been made to enhance user experience and to simplify and improve power management profiling capabilities. (BZ#682378, BZ#697273, BZ#829800)

This update also fixes the following bug:

  • The default soft limit for per-process open file descriptors is 1024, and the default hard limit for per-process file descriptors is 4096. By using the performance counter subsystem, the PowerTOP tool could exceed the limit on complex systems. Consequently, an error message about missing kernel support for perf was displayed. This update adds a fix that temporarily increases both the soft and hard file descriptor limits for the current process to the kernel limit. If the kernel limit is still insufficient, PowerTOP now displays an error message indicating that the file descriptor limits should be manually increased. (BZ#998021)

Users of powertop are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/11258

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian6ppc64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6i386

Updated Packages

  • powertop-2.3-3.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • powertop-debuginfo-2.3-3.el6.ppc64.rpm
  • powertop-2.3-3.el6.i686.rpm
  • powertop-2.3-3.el6.ppc64.rpm
  • powertop-debuginfo-2.3-3.el6.s390x.rpm
  • powertop-2.3-3.el6.src.rpm
  • powertop-debuginfo-2.3-3.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • powertop-debuginfo-2.3-3.el6.i686.rpm
  • powertop-2.3-3.el6.s390x.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information