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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

Why does this require elevated privileges to run? Seems ridiculous for a top-like tool.

Tools like these need to be able to read various counters and other registers in the hardware. Note that powermetrics existed in MacOs since the Intel days and mirrors a lot of the x86 information provided by the Intel tool on Linux (the name of which escapes me at the moment).

You really don't want to give unprivileged code access to this data (check out the man page to see all of the information it can give you).

If you want to understand a lot of what this stuff means on Apple Silicon, you should (oddly) check out the Intel x86 documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

The Linux tool is called Intel powertop.

How do Activity Monitor and AlDente get detailed power data? They don't prompt me to elevate privileges.

tyvm for the docs links! I still don't have any specifics in mind for useful attacks one could carry out using the data mentioned in `man powermetrics`. I assume the worry is that this stuff could play a role in some kinds of side-channel attacks but idrk much about low-level OS stuff. :-\

I don't think that Activity Monitor is getting detailed info and thus doesn't need root. You can also get the same kind of info from powermetrics without root.

(it's been a while since I've messed with this stuff, I could be missing some details)

even htop needs sudo to run properly

What htop features are unavailable if you don't run it with elevated privileges?

The only thing I have noticed is the ability to kill/strace processes belong to other users. But that's a given.

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