Arch Linux

Nathan P

Member

Registered: 2008-01-30

Posts: 93

Just a wee bit confused about frequency scaling

Thought I had this all setup but I was in the KDE Control Center menu and noticed a bunch of settings for battery savings there that I hadn't touched.  I have cpufreqd starting on startup and I thought it was all automatic...  I now can't find the wiki page on cpufreqd, only cpufrequtils.  Can someone straighten me out here?  Also, is there a GUI tool to choose what profile to use? (Like when on battery but wanting to game for a period of time I'd like to be able to force it to just use the full frequency until I'm done playing, I know this won't last long but sometimes I get little 20 min sessions in when moving around, I have a few games running in wine along with Nexuiz so that's why I ask)

Thanks,
Nathan

Oh, what's the best way to enable sleep or suspend when the screen is closed?  As of now it just switches the screen off and wastes battery...

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Just a wee bit confused about frequency scaling

I think cpufreqd is deprecated now, so it would be better to use cpufrequtils.

There should be some sort of GUI interface for cpufrequtils available in KDE. If there isn't one, you could always use my script instead

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)

setsuna

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2008-04-10

Posts: 30

Re: Just a wee bit confused about frequency scaling

You've read http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU … cy_Scaling right?

Your can use set your processor frequency with the programs in the cpufrequtils package

or add the cpufreq daemon to rc.conf which is contained in the above package.

Using the the daemon saves your from using the command line tools every time you boot your machine and for each processor/core you have

Anyway, it takes these steps to set it up:
1) add the correct module for your processor to MODULES in rc.conf (acpi_cpufreq for core2 processors at least)
2) add the modules for the for your governor of choice (cpufreq_ondemand and cpufreq_performance should be supported)
3) set the values in /etc/conf.d/cpufreq to choose the min/max frequency your processor should have; my old pentium4 supported scaling from 250 MHz to 1.7GHz, and it was a pain to use the computer, so I set the min freq to 900MHz (another one reported by cpufreq-info) and max freq to 1.7GHz

2 and 3 can be found using

cpufreq-info

from the terminal, you should read two lines like these:

available frequency steps: 2.39 GHz, 1.60 GHz
available cpufreq governors: ondemand, performance

read the wiki for more info, but take note that cpufreq daemons can take care of more than one processor/core so

Notes for Dual/MultiCore processors:

in the wiki is not needed anymore.

For power profiles, I can't help you, because I don't use them.

Cheers

alex_anthony

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-09-25

Posts: 344

Re: Just a wee bit confused about frequency scaling

and try the pm-utils page in the wiki for sleep and suspend.