CPU Throttling not running in laptop

Jorge Tomé Hernando jorge at jorgetome.info
Tue Jun 13 21:50:11 UTC 2006


Lord Sauron escribió:
> 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?
Yes, totally sure.
>
>> 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!
The problem persists after a totally fresh install (i formated the hard 
disk), therefore it cannot be related to a broken KDE. :-(

In fact I have repeated a fresh install (formatting the hard drive) 
three times and all times the result has been the same. The system is 
unusable because of the slow performance.
>
>> 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).
ACPI support is loaded and running. I have tested it (twice).
>
>> 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!
I am sure that nowadays your laptop is faster than mine running Kubuntu. :-(
> 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.
This could be interesting. I thought that powernowd was the better 
option for my processor. Could be KLaptop a better alternative?, could 
you give some idea about the differences between them?.

Can also some of you point me to an applet for the KDE bar to monitor 
the CPU speed and temperature?. I had one in Breezy but i don't remember 
the name and all of them i find in the repositories are for Gnome.

Thanks in advance

-- 
Jorge Tomé Hernando
http://www.JorgeTome.info
Linux Registered User #362778





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