cpufreq in the power manager

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 09/14/2009 11:51 PM, Josh Saddler wrote:
> Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>> On what information is this belief founded?  Regardless, why should
>> these problems be "solved" by a userspace GUI app?
>>
>> (If your laptop is getting too hot because your CPU is running at a high
>> frequency too often, it's probably because the kernel or SMC chip or
>> whatever is doing a poor job of controlling your fan.  Putting a band
>> aid on the problem by throttling the CPU is not the solution.)
> 
> Actually, I need to control CPU speed fairly often:.I need to change
> governors and manually set the speed any time I watch full-screen Flash
> video from Hulu or Youtube.

Then that's a bug in the ondemand governor, or something else
kernel-related.

> I have to find the right balance between
> required performance and heat/power draw that eventually spins up the
> PSU fan.

A user should not have to bother with these things.  While a knob to
turn in xfpm would "fix" the problem for you, it just needlessly
clutters the interface for something that should be fixed in the kernel.

> Right now Flash doesn't properly report its CPU load needs, so both
> cores remain at minimum, which isn't enough for my R700 card +
> xf86-video-ati driver to do all the heavy lifting.

Apps don't "report" their CPU load needs.  The cpufreq governor is
supposed to adjust CPU speed based on actual load.  The fact that it
doesn't indicates a bug in the kernel.

>>> I wanted to ask whether you would consider (re-)implementing a CPU
>>> frequency tab in both "On AC" and "On Battery", in which users could
>>> select the desired governor. A nice addition would be an option to
>>> select the minimum and maximum frequency that the current governor can
>>> choose.
>>
>> Featuritis...
> 
> Just because *you* don't want it doesn't make it a disease. :)

And just because *you* want it doesn't make it not featuritis.  Yes, we
could go on like this for days ^_~

The bottom line is that the average GUI-using user should never ever
*ever* need to touch these settings.

	-b