Talk:How to make use of Dynamic Frequency Scaling

From ThinkWiki
Revision as of 23:25, 17 January 2006 by Wyrfel (Talk | contribs) (Obsolete daemons)
Jump to: navigation, search

CPUfreq "stuck"

Using the "acpi-cpufreq" and "processor" modules, I can use the performance and ondemand governor with great success on a T43, and it switches between 2.1 GHz and ~700 MHz without incident. However, sometimes the processor becomes "stuck" at ~700 MHz, and when I switch to the performance governor "cat /proc/cpuinfo" notes it is still at ~700 MHz.

I have not been able to precisely reproduce these conditions, but they have happened several times. It is cured by a reboot. I'm not running any userspace frequency governers. Anybody else experienced this peculiar behavior? gsmenden 11:20, 10 JAN 2006 (CEST)


I had something similar on my T43. It seems that BIOS interfers with cpufreqd's operation. In the end I set BIOS to "maximum performance" when the laptop is on AC, and let cpufreqd keep track of the speed. It seems to work for me (T43, 2669, 2.6.15-kernel)


Verfied for my T43. Article amended.

CPU Speedstep management activation

I could not find the "processor" and "acpi-cpufreq" modules, thus leading to an empty /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/ and preventing to set cpu throttling. I found the speedstep-centrino module which enables the feature. Environment : X41 (Pentium M), Debian Sid with custom 2.6.12 kernel. Is the Debian part of the article outdated ? Hope this helps, Vincent

speedstep-smi for T22

I had to use the speedstep-smi driver for my T22, not the speedstep-ich driver as stated in the how-to. Thomas


Yes, it was a mistake. Thanks for the note. Wyrfel 21:49, 27 Oct 2005 (CEST)


Extremely low freq on a T22

About an hour ago I made Speedstep work on a T22 running Ubuntu Breezy (5.10). Before that I had the machine randomly boot at 700MHz or 900MHz. That is nothing special. But, earlier today, when I booted it, it was running at 187MHz, according to both /proc/cpuinfo and Gnome's CPU frequency applet. It also took about 4 times as long to do some CPU-intensive processing than usually (grepping and sorting a known amount of text), so I'm still thinking that my Thinkpad really was running at 187MHz until I rebooted it.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this? Is there a way to replicate this behavior? Is there a way to "enable" this "step"?

-- _sd


Yes, i brought my X20 down to similarly low frequencies also with Ubuntu. I think it's possible through ACPI throttling, but I'm not sure if that was actually how i did it.

Wyrfel 23:51, 9 Jan 2006 (CET)


Obsolete daemons

Removed the note about daemons being obsolete. Using ondemand/conservate is *not* a replacement for daemons, they are generally smarter than a fixed governor and can adapt to different situations better.


I reinserted the note, but changed it a little. The point about that note is that most users get good results and less confusion with those two governors. Feel free to extend the section by some remarks about why one might want to use a deamon instead.

Wyrfel 10:40, 16 January 2006 (CET)


Elaborated a bit on it.

--Earthwings 23:15, 17 January 2006 (CET)


Thx, reads good.

Wyrfel 23:25, 17 January 2006 (CET)