>> I installed SL10.1 today on a P3M laptop (Dell D600) >> and it defaults to the "Powersave" scheme which includes >> "Dynamic Frequency Scaling" (ondemand), so that is good. >> >> However, by defaulit "Allow Throttling" is CHECKED >> and Max % is set to 50%. >> >> Exactly what does this mean? >> I looked in /proc/acpi/processor/*/throttling and the >> laptop is still in T0. > >It means that the powersaved throttles your CPU if there is no load and >dethrottles if there is load. It's that way already for >several years and >I only got a report about performance loss on SMP systems, so >we don't do >throttling by default on those systems. I see -- my test platform changed from dual-core to single-core, so I didn't see this issue before. >> Is there an easy way for me to modify the kernel to >> convince the powersaved application that the system >> does not support throttling? I'm thinking that we've >> given user-space too much rope and it has proceeded >> to hang itself. > >I'm currently working on a solution to allow throttling only on systems >which don't support CPUfreq. At the point this thread came up, or a few >days later as we talked about it, I completely agreed with you. But at >that time we already had RC1 in regard to SUSE Linux 10.1, so >there was no >possibility anymore to change such a default behaviour. For >the unstable >powersave realeases, there will come up some changes soon, though. I understand, though I think it would be more practical to not enable throttling by default on any system; and for systems with cpufreq to not even advertise this option to users. Also, I think something is broken today. If I use the GUI to disable throttling in the Powersave scheme and save, and then pull out the plug; a window with "watch .../throttling" shows that the system drops into T2, and then bounces back to T0. I don't trust the application to keep its hands off this file, so I think that I need a way to disable/remove that file. thanks, -Len - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-laptop" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
