Handle With Linux

How green is Linux?

In my previous post 10 things to tell your kids when you ditched windows for linux

One of the comments argued that Linux is no more energy efficient than Windows.
So I did a little research.

First of all there's the tickless kernel

The tickless mode is an option in the newest kernels keeping power consumption low by having the processor staying asleep, in the normal state the kernel is waking up the processor on an automated interval. With the tickless kernel it's possible to wake the processor only when there's a real need for it. Effectively saving on power consumption in notebooks and servers alike.

Better virtualization support

Which brings me to my second point, the tickless kernel brings great benefit in virtualized environments.
I have a single pc standing here running 6 vservers without any problem. These are all servers with dedicated purpose running here in the office. If it wasn't for Linux we would need to actually run several full PC's to handle the same services. The system used here is linux-vserver which gives almost no overhead, you don't notice anything about running in a virtual environment ever. This is just a normal pc which is maybe capable of only running one windows XP instance at reasonable speed. Let alone windows server.

Not forced to use anything you don't need

Linux gives you the opportunity to take everything out you don't need, this makes it much more efficient. I can't imagine running a dedicated webserver with a gui. I don't have a clue how someone can come up with the idea of doing this. A Gui eats resources that's obvious and when you are using windows to download a big file at home, when your asleep it's still fully running. I download files while asleep on a minimal resources system.

Low power hardware

There's a lot of low power hardware available for Linux, just take a look at soekris boards. Running at about 8 watts. Functioning as a firewall, wifi access point, router and storage gateway at the same time!
How's that for efficiency.

Reusability

Many hardware devices which have been used to run windows versions which are no longer supported, are thrown away. This has an enormous environmental impact. These devices contain numerous poisonous components. Which often don't get disposed of properly. By reusing this hardware with Linux it's not only preventing new production but also preventing the hardware from being dumped.

Durability

Directly related to previous point, Linux doesn't need as much hardware replacement as does windows. You can still run Linux on very old hardware. This is obviously better for the environment. Linux users have been reported to only have to upgrade their hardware 50% of the time windows users do.

Linux green initiatives

There are many initiatives aimed at making Linux greener.

There's intel's lesswatts.org
where you'll find a lot of information about making Linux more energy efficient.

And also IBM's big green initiative.

Environmental friendly computers available

Many low power personal computers are on the market which have linux installations tuned to low power usage, something you just can't do with windows because you can't legally make your own windows distro.

And red hat seems to get some credit for being environmentally friendly to:
red hat greenest operating system

Added benefits of Open Source

And there's also the incalculable benefit of open source, we can only imagine how much power is saved by not having to develop the same thing twice (or many more times) because once written it can be reused.
Furthermore Open Source has a faster development track, so energy saving improvements are incorporated sooner.

So still more reasons to use Linux!

This is just a short list,feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment.

Comments have to be authorized and most of the readers are in different time zones, so don't worry if your comments are not published immediately. It can take up to 10 hours.

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