EST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep(R) Technology) on amd64

[Gabriel Lavoie]

Another question. Any reason why powerd doesn't use
dev.est.0.freq_settings when it is available instead of
dev.cpu.0.freq_levels?

On my system:
dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 2500/88000 2187/77000 2000/47608 1750/41657
1600/44616 1400/39039 1200/41800 1050/36575 900/31350 750/26125
600/20900 450/15675 300/10450 150/5225
dev.est.0.freq_settings: 2500/88000 2000/47608 1600/44616 1200/41800

If I don't lower the polling time of powerd to 100ms, my system
becomes way too much unresponsive because powerd takes too much time
to increase the frequency, step by step and there are a lot of
settings with dev.est.0.freq_settings (14). With
dev.est.0.freq_settings, the minimal setting is high enough so the
system stays responsive and powerd would bring it up to max frequency
quickly enough, even if the polling time is still kept at 500ms. This
would work more like Windows or Linux where the lowest frequency at
which the CPU will drop is the lowest EIST gives (here 1200 MHz).

Gabriel

2009/1/9 Nate Lawson <nate at root.org>:
> Gabriel Lavoie wrote:
>> My processor seems correctly recognized by est under 7.1, I get the
>> correct frequency/value pairs. What I would like is the automatic
>> behaviour where the CPU is downclocked to 50% under no load, found
>> under Windows/Linux and I would also like to know why estctrl isn't
>> supported under amd64. I already contacted Colin. :)
>
> powerd(8) is what you want. You can set an absolute frequency for idle.
>
> --
> Nate
>



-- 
Gabriel Lavoie
glavoie at gmail.com