KDE Eco

Green Coding collaborates with KDE Eco [15], a fledgling KDE initiative that aims to bring more sustainability to free and open software. The initial aim is to measure the energy requirements of free and open source software with a view to helping developers optimize software later on. The KDE Eco project offers two central repositories [16].

The FOSS Energy Efficiency Project (FEEP [17]) is fundamentally based on the Blue Angel methodology. (Blue Angel is a German initiative that assigns a special label to designate environmentally friendly products.) The FEEP website describes a measurement setup [18] that requires a reference computer, an energy meter, and software. This equipment helps to automate the execution of the software under test conditions and to record and process the measured data.

The BE4FOSS repository [19] collects Blue Angel information and provides links to accompanying workshops and manuals. Anyone thinking of certifying their own software with the Blue Angel label can find help in the Blue Angel Application [20] repository.

Conclusions

If you are seriously interested in software and energy saving, you will find many resources on the web; the examples presented in this article are a few of the projects working on the critical problem of energy efficiency. What is clear, however, is that many software efficiency projects are still in their infancy. As of now, the software community has no fixed standards for the measurement process or toolchains for integrating these capabilities into large infrastructures. Once these hurdles are removed, energy measurement tools could have a noticeable impact on software energy usage.