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stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

[SOLVED] No more cpufreq on my Core i3 (first gen)

I noticed today that I don’t have /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq anymore. This is with linux 3.15.5, but I booted into the LTS kernel too (3.14.13) and it’s the same.

acpi-cpufreq is not loaded…

$ sudo modprobe acpi-cpufreq 
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'acpi_cpufreq': No such device

/proc/cpuinfo reports:

vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 37
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU         550  @ 3.20GHz
stepping	: 5
microcode	: 0x2
cpu MHz		: 3840.242

3.8GHz?

I had phc-intel installed previously but disabled it some months ago because it made my system slower. I noticed it was still installed today so I uninstalled it, and as far as I can see there’s no remnant of it… I also reinstalled linux afterwards just in case.

Any idea?

Edit: I installed i7z and it looks like the frequency is changing and adapting to the load anyway. Also even though it also says the max freq is 3.8GHz, both cores only go up to 3.2GHz when I run mprime -t.

Cpu speed from cpuinfo 3840.00Mhz
cpuinfo might be wrong if cpufreq is enabled. To guess correctly try estimating
Linux's inbuilt cpu_khz code emulated now
True Frequency (without accounting Turbo) 3839 MHz
  CPU Multiplier 24x || Bus clock frequency (BCLK) 159.96 MHz

Socket [0] - [physical cores=2, logical cores=4, max online cores ever=2]
  TURBO DISABLED on 2 Cores, Hyper Threading ON
  Max Frequency without considering Turbo 3839.00 MHz (159.96 x [24])
  Max TURBO Multiplier (if Enabled) with 1/2/3/4 Cores is  24x/24x/0x/0x
  Real Current Frequency 2540.07 MHz [159.96 x 15.88] (Max of below)
        Core [core-id]  :Actual Freq (Mult.)      C0%   Halt(C1)%  C3 %   C6 %
        Core 1 [0]:       2431.19 (15.20x)      4.48    10.9    13.7    72.6
        Core 2 [1]:       2540.07 (15.88x)      5.29    7.54    14.6    74.4

In the BIOS of my GA-H55N-USB3 motherboard, EIST (Speedstep) is set to “Auto” and I don’t remember changing it, but I may have selected “Load optimized defaults” or similar when I upgraded my RAM recently.

Last edited by stqn (2014-07-24 12:53:57)

mar04

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2010-02-08

Posts: 117

Re: [SOLVED] No more cpufreq on my Core i3 (first gen)

Intel switched from cpufreq to intel_pstate a while ago, although I'm not sure if first gen i3/5/7s are covered by pstate driver (2nd gen are for sure).

dmesg | grep pstate

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] No more cpufreq on my Core i3 (first gen)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CP … ncy_driver

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: [SOLVED] No more cpufreq on my Core i3 (first gen)

Thanks for your answers. I have read the whole wiki page already, and no, first gen Core i processors are not using intel_pstate.

However I just tried to set EIST to “Enabled” instead of “Auto” in my motherboard’s BIOS, and that fixed the problem! (It was late yesterday and I didn’t try it until today.)

i7z still says that my max frequency is 3.8GHz though, and I wonder if cpufreq is that important when the CPU was already adapting its frequency without it…

Anyway, thanks, problem solved!

Last edited by stqn (2014-07-24 12:53:04)