cpufreq in the power manager

[Auke Kok]

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. I have to find the right balance between
> required performance and heat/power draw that eventually spins up the
> PSU fan.
> 
> Right now Flash doesn't properly report its CPU load needs,

no application CAN even do that.

> so both
> cores remain at minimum, which isn't enough for my R700 card +
> xf86-video-ati driver to do all the heavy lifting.
> 
> Most of the time I can just leave my desktop and laptop set to the
> "ondemand" governor, but as often as I switch to the userspace, an easy
> graphical interface would be valuable to me, as a user. Because doing
> things in the terminal sucks.

please, use the ondemand governor and file bugs against it's behavior. 
what you want is a quick hackfix, while we should be looking at why the 
ondemand governor is broken for your workload.

I strongly encourage you to start a thread on the powertop mailinglist 
about this, or even lkml. Please Cc me on my work address to: 
auke-jan.h.kok at intel.com.

>>> 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. :)
> 
> I, too, would like to see this feature. It's useful for at least a few
> people.
> 
>>> Also, "Information" could report battery as well as current
>>> governor/frequency information.
>> Displaying the current freq could be nice.
> 
> Indeed.

I would - if ever - just write a separate plugin for this instead.

battery and CPU are very different things. A single CPU plugin that can 
do this would seem much more appropriate than polluting the simple 
battery plugin.

Auke