Re: cpu running half speed on FC2

[Warren Togami <wtogami redhat com>]

Bryan J. Field wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I updated my (old) laptop from FC1 to FC2 yesterday and after the usual 
> problems with the pcmcia cards and networking, I've noticed something 
> strange.
>
> I monitor my CPU and ethernet usage with gkrellm and I've noticed that 
> my computer is running at about half the speed it should and the clock 
> is running at about twice the speed it should.
>
> The laptop is a IBM Thinkpad i1412 with 512MB Ram and a 366 MHz Celeron. 
> gkrellm says its running at 182 MHz. I've added the acpid and enabled it 
> in the grub.conf with acpi=on. The battery monitor doesn't work either, 
> and it used to in FC1.
>
> I've poked around a little, but my ACPI knowledge is limited. I've 
> noticed that my /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/ directory has no 
> sub-directories. I gather this is because I doubt this hardware supports 
> this kind of thing.
>
> Any suggestions? 366MHz was just usable for what I do, but 182MHz is 
> unacceptable.

[root ibmlaptop sys]# cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq
[root ibmlaptop cpufreq]# ls
cpuinfo_max_freq  scaling_available_frequencies  scaling_driver 
scaling_max_freq  scaling_setspeed
cpuinfo_min_freq  scaling_available_governors    scaling_governor 
scaling_min_freq
[root ibmlaptop cpufreq]# cat scaling_driver
centrino
[root ibmlaptop cpufreq]# cat scaling_governor
userspace
[root ibmlaptop cpufreq]# cat scaling_available_frequencies
1600000 1400000 1200000 1000000 800000 600000

My 1.6GHz Pentium M based IBM Thinkpad T41 runs at the minimum 600MHz 
most of the time because the processor is mostly idle.  The cpuspeed 
service monitors CPU usage, and kicks it up to the higher levels if it 
is needed.  If I am building something large on my laptop, cpuspeed 
kicks it up to 1.6GHz.  My battery gets eaten much faster, temperatures 
rise, and the fan blows at full speed.

If you really don't want cpuspeed to manage your processor, you can 
disable it with:
service cpuspeed stop
chkconfig cpuspeed off

cat /proc/cpuinfo
Use this to verify your current speed and processor features.

Warren Togami
wtogami redhat com