This talk aims to detail the recent developments in carbon tracking infrastructure in the Linux kernel for measuring the carbon (and energy) consumption of hardware devices and processes (software applications). We have built a power panel that allows the users to see which hardware devices or applications are responsible for system’s power consumption and carbon emissions. These statistics are extremely useful for both users, programmers, and system designers.

Major objectives in this talk would include a detailed discussion on the development of the required infrastructure and multivariate regression models to determine application and hardware device power consumption. DevOpsDays would be a great platform to present the work done so far to the developer community and get feedback to further improve and fine-tune models towards better predictions. There are also privacy concerns attached to this data which need feedback from more developers.

Tracking carbon emissions and energy attribution systems in the Linux kernel enable a reliable method for end-consumers to measure the carbon footprint of all applications they are running on their personal devices. I believe this is the first step towards making consumers aware of the enormous carbon footprint of personal computing and helping generate discussion on methods for reducing the same.

I hope that this talk delivers significant utility for open source software developers to monitor system resource consumption efficiently and end-users as a tool to identify major carbon emission-causing applications.