Akademy 2025

KEcoLab: KDE's Automation Tool For Energy Consumption Measurements

6 Sept 2025, 11:25

40m

Room 2

Conference Talk KDE Development

Speaker

Mr Karanjot Singh

Description

KEcoLab is an automation tool that allows KDE developers to remotely measure the energy consumption of their KDE software through GitLab CI/CD. Instead of obtaining measurements manually and in person in a lab such as the one at KDAB, Berlin, KDE developers can trigger the process through GitLab CI/CD, wherever they are. This enables developers to effortlessly assess their software's energy consumption when merging new code into the codebase.

KEcoLab opens the door for data-driven software development that prioritizes energy efficiency, while also making it easy to obtain the reports needed for certifying software with the Blue Angel ecolabel, the official environmental label of the German government.

Social Links

Website - drquark.live
Invent - https://invent.kde.org/drquark

Description

KEcoLab automates the traditionally manual process of measuring software energy usage by running predefined usage scenarios on a dedicated lab PC. The setup includes a Gude power meter connected to a Raspberry Pi, which records energy and power consumption during script execution. Developers initiate this process by submitting a merge request containing usage scripts. Once completed, a detailed energy consumption report is generated using OSCAR (Open-source Software Consumption Analysis in R), a tool developed by researchers at Umwelt Campus Birkenfeld. 

In this talk — complemented by a measurement-focused BoF — I will:

Present details about how KEcoLab works and the technologies behind it

Demonstrate how to integrate KEcoLab into KDE project repositories

Explain the energy consumption data available in the generated reports

Discuss the benefits of energy measurement for sustainable software development

Share opportunities for the KDE community to contribute and get involved

KEcoLab makes energy transparency accessible and actionable, supporting KDE’s commitment to sustainable software.

Biography

Karanjot Singh is a software engineer at CERN and a contributor to the KDE Eco Project. He has been involved with KDE and KDE Eco for the past few years and currently maintains KEcoLab. He has also taken part in KDE programs like Season of KDE as a mentor and was a Google Summer of Code 2023 student with KDE. He's passionate about the KDE Eco Project because it helps make Free Software more sustainable, both when it's being developed and when it's used.