mxtop

Real-time terminal dashboard for Apple Silicon telemetry, implemented in Rust.

Monitor CPU, GPU, ANE, thermal, memory, and battery metrics on your Mac.

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Features

• Per-cluster CPU metrics — frequency, utilisation, and power for each E/P cluster with per-core activity bars
• DVFM frequency heatmaps — visualise CPU and GPU frequency state residency
• GPU and ANE monitoring — active frequency, utilisation, and power draw
• Memory and swap — usage bar with pressure-level indicators via Mach kernel calls
• Thermal pressure — real-time throttling status (nominal/moderate/heavy/critical)
• Battery — charge percentage, charging state, and system power draw
• Sparklines — rolling time-series charts for power, frequency, and memory
• Configurable sample rate — choose the polling interval at startup (100ms–30s)
• Pause/resume — freeze sampling with a keypress

Requirements

• macOS 15.0 or later
• Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4, ...)
• Root privileges (sudo) — required by powermetrics
• Rust 1.85+ (to build from source)

Installation

cargo build --release

The binary is placed at target/aarch64-apple-darwin/release/mxtop.

Usage

sudo ./target/aarch64-apple-darwin/release/mxtop

CLI options

Flag	Short	Default	Description
--interval <MS>	-i	250	Sample interval in milliseconds (100–30000)
--history <N>		60	Sparkline history depth (number of samples, 1–4096)
--verbose	-v		Debug logging to a secure temporary file

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
q / Esc / Ctrl+C	Quit
Space	Toggle pause

How it works

mxtop spawns powermetrics as a subprocess, collecting CPU, GPU, ANE, thermal, and battery telemetry as streaming XML plist data. A reader thread parses samples delimited by NUL bytes and sends them to the main event loop. Memory stats are sampled directly via Mach kernel IPC (host_statistics64). The TUI is rendered with ratatui using the crossterm backend.

Architecture

See docs/architecture.md for a detailed Mermaid diagram of the data flow.