cpufreq governor vs. powernowd

[Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy]

I have found an article titled "How To Make Firefox Over 40% Faster"
In essence, the title couldn't be more wrong, the author is actually 
talking about replacing user space daemon powernowd with "on demand" 
kernel space governor. The title stems from the fact that the author 
uses firefox render speed to benchmark. But one of the points seems very 
logical. The kernel space governor can poll the cpu levels much more 
frequently causing much lower overhead, thus making the system more 
responsive to sudden load increases, such as application start. 
Additionally this way we can get rid of one more "start by default from 
default install" daemon, which is IMHO always a good thing. In short, 
what I propose is:

1. Remove powernowd from the default install or change the startup 
script not to start it by default.
2. Add sysfsutils to the default install
3. Make "on demand" governer teh default.
4. Leave loading a proper cpufreq driver as an exercise for the user, 
same as it is right now (would be nice to auto detect and load an 
appropriate module, but that is a separate problem)

http://martin.ankerl.org/2006/08/16/how-to-make-firefox-40-percent-faster/