CPU Throttling not running in laptop

[Lord Sauron]

On 6/7/06, Jorge Tomé Hernando <jorge at jorgetome.info> wrote:
> I am trying to upgrade my laptop from Breezy to Dapper. The process is
> being far to be easy. The upgrade using apt did not work, a lot of
> problems with dependencies. Trying to do a fresh install with the new
> graphical installer also failed, the installer died without any message.
> After this I downloaded the  alternative install CD and made a fresh
> install formating the hard drive.

Are you sure you used the dist-upgrade argument?

> The process was without mayor problems but after it i have got an almost
> unusable laptop because it works in an extreme slow way. It takes more
> than 10 seconds to open a simple terminal, for example.

To me that sounds like a broken KDE.  Back up all your settings from
you favorite programs, and then delete ~/.kde or ~/.kde3.5, whichever
one is relevant.  Whenever my KDE starts acting sluggishly I just axe
that and it all seems to work fine again.  I'm working on isolating
the precise setting that causes to slowness, but I haven't found it
yet.

Don't do this until you're absolutely sure you want to though, and
keep a backup somewhere - it can save your butt later on!

> I have already enable the DMA in all the drivers and also i have installed
> the fglrx drivers for the ATI graphic card. But the problem persists.
>
> Now i have found that the CPU throttling is not working. Therefore the CPU
> is running allways at the lowest speed available 800 MHz. With Breezy CPU
> throttling worked without problems (also in the WinXP partition i am using
> in this moment).

I'd ensure that ACPI support is compiled into your kernel.  Get your
kernel sources somewhere nice and safe like /usr/src/linux.  Then run
make && make menuconfig in terminal.  Then you should find the ACPI
section of your kernel's configuration settings.  Enable the support
appropriate to your machine, then run make && make install.

If you're using grub, make sure you keep a backup kernel as well.  I
keep three kernels: the current one, the last one, and the original
one I got with Gentoo as a failsafe (I *know* it works).

> I have tested that the problem persists no matter if i use the 386, k7 or
> 686 kernels (2.6.15-23).
>
> It seems that, for some reason, the CPUFreq driver is not loaded and
> therefore the powernowd daemon is not able to manage the CPU Throttling.
> Furthermore i have seen that the powernow-k6/7/8 drivers are only
> available in the modules directory of the 386 kernel, not in the k7 and
> 686 kernels.
>
> I have boot using the 386 kernel and i have tried to load manualy
> (modprobe) the different CPUFreq drivers: powernow-k8, etc. In some moment
> the powernowd daemon was able to load but indeed in that case the
> processor was allways running at 800MHz.
>
> The laptop is a HP Compaq nx6125 with an AMD Turion 64 processor.

Lucky!  I want one... I'm stuck on a Intel Pentium-M 1.0GHz Ultra-Low
Voltage chip!

> Can you give me some advice about what more we can try?.

I'd try compiling into the kernel.  I also don't think Powernowd is as
complete as it should be.  I generally use KLaptop and friends, but
it's up to you.

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