Indeed, ThinkPads report both instantaneous power/current and a
rolling average (exponentially decaying, I think) over the last ~10
seconds. ACPI provides only the rolling average, and the out-of-tree
tp_smapi driver provides both.
More generally, linux/power_supply.h defines these attributes:
POWER_SUPPLY_PROP_VOLTAGE_NOW,
POWER_SUPPLY_PROP_VOLTAGE_AVG,
POWER_SUPPLY_PROP_CURRENT_NOW,
POWER_SUPPLY_PROP_CURRENT_AVG,
It would be nice if the power meter interface uses the same
conventions as the power supply interface, since the former is
essentially a subset of the latter. Userspace app that read power
meters via sysfs should work for power supplies too.
Shem
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