Using powersave in everyday life (was: Proposal for resolving powernowd/apmd...)

[Danny Kukawka]

On Wednesday 19 April 2006 22:53, Michel D'HOOGE wrote:
> 2006/4/19, Danny Kukawka <danny.kukawka at web.de>:
> > Was the kernel ondemand governor loaded?
>
> I can't remember the initial state of the system but I switched for a while
> to the ondemand governor and nothing happened: the frequency remained at
> its highest while I was doing nothing but reading on the screen. I can do
> other experiments if you think it could be of interest. And that time I'll
> write everything down.

No this wasn't what I meant ... I wanted to know whether the ondemand kernel 
module was loaded ...

> What say
>
> > 'cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors' ?
>
> "ondemand userspace powersave performance"

Yes, and it was ;-)

> I played with all of them! But neither ondemand nor userspace changed the
> frequency dynamically - at least not within a minute.

Okay ...
 
> And then I changed /etc/powersave/cpufreq to use the userspace governor.
> When I restarted powersaved the userspace governor was selected with the
> highest frequency and cpufreq_stats showed no sign of reduced frequency. I
> wondered then whether I had to activate another program. But after a while,
> it started to work. Maybe it is due to my tests on the LID events or maybe
> it started to work after my last resume from RAM. However, right now, after
> a cold boot it still works!

I will comment this at the end ...

> > I meant that after resuming from STR, Kpowersave always says the
> > frequency
> >
> > > is 800MHz even if I ask it to switch to  the performance scheme. I
> > > still need to experiment to determine the best configuration.
> >
> > What say: 'grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ -r' (as root)
> > before
> > suspend and what after resume?

I need this info, please use this command and send the output. Thanks.

> Being pleased with what I learned so far I decided to experiment with
> powersave scripts and events. So I added beeps to the LID open/close
> events. And I thus noticed that 3 scripts (beep_hilo, beep_lohi and notice)
> use the usleep command. Unfortunately it is not available in my box and it
> seems to be missing in ubuntu and debian either. 

Okay, good to know, we take a look at this.

> I still have another debug 
> warning in the log ([powersave-hotkey_handler][5884]: WARNING: EV_ID: 55,
> unclean exit ...) but I can't find the name of the faulty script.

And also on this.

> Finally, I noticed some minor bugs: in Kpowersave, notifications for
> "resume from disk" is written twice while "resume from RAM" is absent. I
> also noticed a 'bold' ('b>')error in a french message.

Looks like a bug in the translation. I try to fix this for the next update.

> I do start thinking that my laptop will soon be as good with Linux than
> with the closed drivers provided by Dell on windows :-D

Here we have the problem ... is this a DELL D600 or C640 or some other of the 
Latitude Line? There is a kernel problem. See bug in the SUSE/Novell 
bugzilla: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=119836

I think this is the problem of your machine (I have here a D600 and C640 with 
this bug, I know this is anoying, but fixable in the kernel.)

Cheers,

Danny