howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

[wizard10000]

Easy hack.

1. Install cpufrequtils.

2. Run this in a terminal window

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

and you'll get a list of frequencies your processor supports. Leave the terminal window open.

3. As root, edit /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils

4. Find

GOVERNOR="ondemand"

and change to

GOVERNOR="performance"

5. Find

MIN_SPEED="0"

and paste the desired frequency from step 1 above in place of the zero.

6. Save the file.

7. Reboot and enjoy!

[vinnywright]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

@wizard10000 is their any danger of over working/heating the CPU by setting the MIN_SPEED="0" to high?

VINNY

[wizard10000]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

@wizard10000 is their any danger of over working/heating the CPU by setting the MIN_SPEED="0" to high?

If you bought the PC I'd say it had adequate cooling to run at the processor's rated frequency.

If you *built* the PC all bets are off

[vinnywright]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

HP-G62 that the output of your line ubuve sead the max would be 2399000 so I'm going to try a min of 1999000 and a max of 2399000 and see what happens

VINNY

[vinnywright]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

well sure enough a reboot and now a cat /proc/cpuinfo is showing my new min where it used to show 933.00


VINNY

[vinnywright]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

strangely enough this seams to have brought down my load averages.
where a youtube vid and plug in container used to run the CPU% in top up to 60% it seems to be going no higher than 18-20 now.
but I guess if the available CPU frequency increases then the % reported used by top would go down...........nice

cant wait to see if the time it takes to recode with DeVeDe goes down.

VINNY

EDDIT: temps seam lower than normal as well ........strange.......used to run up to 126 rite fast...staying about 113 now?

[SteveRiley]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

OK, what you guys are reporting seems really strange. If I set my ThinkPad's governor to performance, the fan runs like a jet engine and the thing gets so hot that I'm certain it would affect my ability to have more children! OTOH, setting the governor to ondemand and configuring thinkfan has allowed the laptop to remain blissfully quiet and cool. Yet it will scale up as required, like when it's decoding a video stream. I'm really curious to see if others here note that a full-time performance setting results in the same things you're seeing.

[vinnywright]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

well I must add that I did not set to performance; just added a min and max as described

but I will now and see if the fan goes berserk on me .....so far not.

VINNY

[wizard10000]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

OK, what you guys are reporting seems really strange. If I set my ThinkPad's governor to performance, the fan runs like a jet engine and the thing gets so hot that I'm certain it would affect my ability to have more children! OTOH, setting the governor to ondemand and configuring thinkfan has allowed the laptop to remain blissfully quiet and cool. Yet it will scale up as required, like when it's decoding a video stream. I'm really curious to see if others here note that a full-time performance setting results in the same things you're seeing.

When using ondemand my 2.66Ghz i7-920 desktop wouldn't scale up past 1.6Ghz even this morning when I rendered two two-hour avi files to DVD format simultaneously - I had eight threads running, processor use approaching 100% and the thing still wouldn't scale up. What should have been about a 25 minute job took a bit better than 40 minutes.

And - my netbook hasn't sterilized me yet

[Detonate]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

Setting my min to 3334000 on my i5 seems to actually make it run cooler. Will watch it to see what it does under a heavy load.

[vinnywright]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

I set to performance and rebooted started DeVeDe working ......about 25% of the way thrugh recoding I saw the first scale up on the CPU and just checking cat /proc/cpuinfo has showen it back down .......so thats working........temp is up to 156F now at 48% of the recode and the fan is running (first time I have ever felt it) but not going crazy........61% thrugh the recode CPU is scaled back up to max....sweet.......temp is leveld off at 158-160F

seams great to me .........thanks for the tip @wizard10000 I can get the full potental of this core I3 now ...sweet 8)

and by the way that DVD is 90% done now as I wrote this OK about 10-15 min starting with a 550MiB .avi .........oops it's done 18 min as reported by DeVeDe

VINNY

[dibl]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

I leave my main desktop set on "Performance" -- this is Debian/KDE 4.6.5. It is an i7 950, and it only seems to know two steps -- full speed (3.2GHz) and half speed (1.6GHz). But it adapts nicely to what I'm doing, and spends most of its life at the 1.6GHz level.

The netbooks and laptop are set to "On Demand", but I must admit I don't pay much attention to their speeds and don't have a conky on them to make it easy for me to check.

[wizard10000]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

I leave my main desktop set on "Performance" -- this is Debian/KDE 4.6.5. It is an i7 950, and it only seems to know two steps -- full speed (3.2GHz) and half speed (1.6GHz). But it adapts nicely to what I'm doing, and spends most of its life at the 1.6GHz level.

Moving processor scaling to the kernel broke my overclocking efforts. If I disable CPU scaling on my i7-920 and crank it up to 3.2GHz my NIC goes away. Irritating, since it ran at that speed for more than a year - so now I've got the processor locked in turbo mode, which appears to be as good as it gets

[dibl]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

Right - my Asus mobo will let me overclock, and I've got an overclock defined at 4.2GHz, on air cooling. But that is incompatible with KDE settings, apparently. Of late, I've settled for the KDE settings. If I ever get back to encoding DVDs, I'll want my 4.2GHz overclock -- otherwise it doesn't matter for practical purposes.

[oshunluvr]

Re: howto: disable cpu frequency scaling the easy way

Worth noting - at least here - Ubuntu cpuinfo mis-reports CPU freq. My Q6600-B0 is at 3.06 and it still reports 2.4 even though speed tests verify the overclock.