On October 30, 2004 1:35 pm, Satish Balay wrote: Whoa. Good to know. It was way slow, even WITH my power cord plugged in. Yep, this did make things report as being faster: model name : mobile AMD Athlon(tm) XP2800+ stepping : 0 cpu MHz : 2120.092 (previously it was 5hundredsomething). I don't notice any difference WITH the power cord in, but when I take it out, the computer remains usable. Strangely, screen drawing is still noticably different with the power cord unplugged, but it is well within tolerable limits now. OK, where can I find this speedstep? -- Trevor Smith // trevor(a)haligonian.com

Hi Trevor, On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 13:18:47 -0300, Trevor Smith <trevor(a)haligonian.com&gt; wrote: I have a Compaq R3000Z with an Athlon64 that is very similar to your R2197. You might look at the archives of the LinuxR3000 mailing list: http://quanta.homeip.net/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 While not directly applicable, there is some discussion about frequency scaling with the k8 driver. I'm using the k8 driver with powernowd, and frequency scaling works great. [snip] Not sure, but probably on the right track. Look at the files in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ Specifically cat the files scaling_available_frequencies and scaling_governor to see what frequencies you can run and what governor you are running. I know if I boot up on battery power, my laptop cuts off the highest frequency setting. Also, check that you are running cpufreqd or powernowd or something of the like. If you are using one of these, you scaling_governor should read "userspace" to use them. Certainly the performance you are describing is not good. With scaling, your processor should idle at a lower speed and then increase speed when it needs to do work. This prolongs battery life and saves power and heat as your processor can relax when it isn't doing anything useful. This could be true. If you really want to turn it off, you can do this as root: echo "performance" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor This will cause you cpu to always run at the highest available frequency. Now, this frequency could be lower if you are on battery, which is what I see on my laptop. The best thing is to use a governor. Powernowd is pretty good, and it's simple. You can get it from http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html Do some looking around in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ and report back what you find. Jonathan

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 23:38:38 -0300, Trevor Smith <trevor(a)haligonian.com&gt; wrote: Yeah, you have to create a script, put it in /etc/init.d/ and run a couple of commands to get it to start on boot. I'd give you more details, but I'm in Windows at the moment. I'll send you mine that I made up, if you want it, next time I go back to the Light Side : ). In the mean time, you can start it manually as root. I think it may have come with an init script, but you need to add some comments to it to use chkconfig and have it start at boot. Look at some other scripts in /etc/init.d/ and edit the one that came with powernowd. The comments should be pretty obvious. Something like # chkconfig 2345 5 95 where the last two numbers indicate when it will start and stop in the boot and shutdown sequence. You want this to start early, stop late. If you have the /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ directory and all the files in it, then yes, you do have the sysfs interface. It should be there on the Fedora kernels, at least as a module. I custom compiled my kernel so I don't remember exactly; I need psmouse as a module and wanted ntfs support (before I realized that you could download the module). If the afore mentioned cpuspeed command (from Satish) worked, then you must be running the cpuspeed daemon, which does the same thing. I'm not sure how to configure that one, but you should be able to get it to do the frequency scaling as well. Jonathan

On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 02:30:13 -0300, Trevor Smith <trevor(a)haligonian.com&gt; wrote: See below. I changed the "modprobe powernow-k8" line to "...-k7", but I don't think this line is necessary. You can put the script in a file called powernow (or whatever you want), make sure it is executable, and put it in /etc/init.d/ Then run: chkconfig --add powernow chkconfig --level 2345 powernow on and if I'm remembering correctly, you should be set. Of course, do all as root. Just don't call the script powernowd, as this causes problems with the "killall powernowd" statements in the script; it took me a while to figure that one out... : ) Notice that I've added the option -p 100, which causes it to poll every 100 ms instead of the default every second. Seems to bump the frequency up much more quickly and not take up any more cpu power. Yep, this is what it should do. Very good. Strange. powernowd should not change characteristics. Do any of your files in the sysfs folder (/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/) change when going to/from AC power? You mentioned that graphics seemed sluggish. Perhaps you video card has a power save mode. I know mine does (nVidia 440 Go) at least in Windows. You can set it to three different performance levels for running on battery or on power. I don't know if these are configurable in Linux, though. Do you know of anything like this for your g-card? Amazing how good those AMD cpus can be, even at slow speeds : ). My 64 still clips along even if I leave it at the low 800 MHz. And they just rock at top speed. No problem. Jonathan ----------- Begin powernow --------------- #! /bin/bash # # chkconfig: 2345 5 95 # description: CPU frequency scaling daemon # # This is a simple example script to show how one could control powernowd # with one simple command. it could be adapted to be used as an init script. # # It unserstands "stop", "start", "restart", and these other commands: # "dyn" turn on dynamic control (alias to start, aka, run the daemon) # "high" kill daemon, set cpu to high speed. # "low" kill daemon, set cpu to low speed. # OPTIONS="-p 100" if [ "$1" = "start" -o "$1" = "restart" -o "$1" = "dyn" ]; then killall -15 powernowd >& /dev/null modprobe powernow-k7 /usr/sbin/powernowd $OPTIONS exit fi if [ "$1" = "stop" ]; then killall -15 powernowd >& /dev/null exit fi if [ "$1" = "high" -o "$1" = "low" ]; then killall -15 powernowd >& /dev/null for i in `/bin/ls /sys/devices/system/cpu/`; do pushd . >& /dev/null cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/$i/cpufreq if [ "$1" = "low" ]; then cat scaling_min_freq > scaling_setspeed else cat scaling_max_freq > scaling_setspeed fi popd >& /dev/null done exit fi echo "Unrecognised option \"$1\"" exit ----------- End powernow ---------------