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Vchat20
Landing is the REAL challenge
Premium Member
join:2003-09-16
Columbus, OH

Vchat20

Premium Member

Permanently force cpu governor/clocks?

Short of this is I just put my old Inspiron laptop with a C2D T7200 into service for running Plex. Majority of the time it is running idle for direct play stuff in-house but need that extra boost for transcoding otherwise. Got cpufreqd and utils installed but can't get things to stick. My options stay for a little while, maybe a few hours, then reset.
root@server:/etc/default# cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 008: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2009
Report errors and bugs to cpufreq@vger.kernel.org, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
  hardware limits: 1000 MHz - 2.00 GHz
  available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 1.67 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1000 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 2.00 GHz and 2.00 GHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 2.00 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
  cpufreq stats: 2.00 GHz:84.97%, 1.67 GHz:2.01%, 1.33 GHz:0.23%, 1000 MHz:12.79%  (10028)
analyzing CPU 1:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 1
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 1
  maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
  hardware limits: 1000 MHz - 2.00 GHz
  available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 1.67 GHz, 1.33 GHz, 1000 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 2.00 GHz and 2.00 GHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 2.00 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
  cpufreq stats: 2.00 GHz:84.81%, 1.67 GHz:1.96%, 1.33 GHz:1.13%, 1000 MHz:12.10%  (9123)
 
Which is what it seems to default to. I'd like to switch it to either ondemand or powersave and have the minimum clock at 1Ghz but as stated, it won't stick. :( Thoughts on where to look?
Kearnstd
Space Elf
Premium Member
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ

Kearnstd

Premium Member

have you checked the BIOS? as in have you checked to see if you can shut off all the power saving stuff. I would imagine the BIOS may be stepping back the CPU at some point. Could also be thermal if its a laptop and not meant to go over its factory limits.

I am not familiar though with OS based overclocking, only the real overclocking in advanced BIOS settings.

Vchat20
Landing is the REAL challenge
Premium Member
join:2003-09-16
Columbus, OH

1 edit

Vchat20

Premium Member

I guess I should rephrase that I'm not really looking to overclock or anything, but I want it to slow down when the dang thing is idling. Majority of the time it is sitting with <2% cpu use but it keeps resetting itself to the performance governor and locking it to 2Ghz when it could drop to 1Ghz at its lowest.

My main issue is this is indeed a laptop and would like to try and keep temps to a minimum considering it is idle most of the time. As far as setting the governor and clock limits it keeps fighting me and going 'full tilt' every time it resets.

If there's any other ideas to get this thing to be a bit more efficient, by all means let me know! The BIOS unfortunately doesn't have many options on this model for power saving or disabling hardware devices so it all has to be done inside the OS.

EDIT: Fixed formatting. Stupid HTML formatting.

CPUsprinter
@commspeed.net

CPUsprinter

Anon

I have a reasonably fast CPU so I want to always get what I'm paying for

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors

modprobe cpufreq_performance

cpufreq-set -f2800000

Has always worked for me and stays that way on Debian sid.

And my CPU has not self destructed nor has my electric bill in 5 years.

Vchat20
Landing is the REAL challenge
Premium Member
join:2003-09-16
Columbus, OH

Vchat20

Premium Member

Just wanted to come back and say that after toying with it the past couple weeks I think I finally nailed it and even figured out some other improvements. Uninstalling the cpufreqd daemon and leaving the cpufreq-utils stopped the whole governor reset issue and let me use the related tools to set it to what I want which has been rock solid the past few days. Namely both cores set on powersave and minimum frequency at its lowest which is 1Ghz for this proc. It has been happily idling at 1Ghz for much of the time.

Secondly playing around with powertop tunables and trying to get some unneeded hardware disabled I managed to get a lot of stuff turned off by a massive module blacklist. For example the sound card is totally useless. I initially just tried blacklisting snd (or snd_core, I forget. Whiever one is the top level module in this case) but it didn't seem to take. But after blacklisting every related sound module they all disappeared. Did the same for the GPU and got it 100% killed and that seemed to drastically improve the thermal profile. Lid closed hasn't helped temps much to begin with but idle has went from around 60-65C down to 40-45. Took care of the wireless card as well for good measure.