PowerLetrics: An Open-Source Framework for Power and Energy Metrics for Linux

The increasing energy consumption of software and hardware systems has become a significant concern due to its environmental impact and operational costs. While operating systems like Windows and macOS have proprietary, undocumented energy analytics functionality, this feature is still lacking in Linux. In this paper we introduce PowerLetrics, an open-source framework designed to monitor and analyze power consumption metrics on a process level on Linux. By providing real-time power monitoring and flexible integration capabilities, PowerLetrics enables users to conduct power-related studies to improve energy efficiency. The main contributions are: 1) A novel and secure approach for the operating system to share energy metrics with processes and containers through the /proc file system without needing root permission, 2) An open source implementation influenced by the macOS powermetrics command for Linux using eBPF and 3) a discussion of the Linux Energy Estimation Engine (L3E) which enables users to tweak or build their own models.