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The power consumed by a processor in a multicore in idle mode in linux is provided in the following file

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpuidle/state0/power

The output is:

4294967295

In linux documentation, it is given that the unit of power consumption in milli watt. That implies the above power = 4294 Kilo watt.

Can some one help me to understand how this can be so huge?

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    Incidentally, 4294967295 is FFFFFFFF in hexadecimal. I bet that isn't really the power consumption.
    – colboynik
    Feb 6, 2013 at 5:46
  • Of note that this would only mostly happen to the old acpi_idle driver. Intel_ide should come with a lookup table that replaces reading FADT from the firmware.
    – mirh
    Dec 10, 2022 at 15:01

2 Answers 2

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IIRC, these values are taken from tables supplied by your BIOS, so it seems your motherboard vendor didn't bother filling in the correct information.

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4294967295 is the 32 bit unsigned representationof the signed value -1. In other words this would be better output as -1 or "unspecified". State 0 is when the processor is running normally (not in an idle state) and the power usage in this state is highly variable.

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