[powerd] mode adaptive2

[Bruno Ducrot]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 10:05:50AM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> Bruno,
> 
> I have posted most of this in the past, but I'll repeat it as you are
> talking about some of the same things.

I have seen your posts, and I will take care of them.

> We need a mechanism (powercontrol?) to talk to the powerd as it is
> running. Among the things it should be able to do is to set a pseudo min
> and max speed. for the system.

Actually I would to add a some more sysctl, especially those:

dev.cpu.*.freq_min and freq_max which would softlimit the available
frequencies
This could be wrapped by a powercontrol (?), but more importantly this
will limit the max in case of passive cooling.

> This would put absolute limits on how
> fast/slow powerd would ever set the speed. The ability to change this is
> important as you would likely want this to be different for battery and
> AC operation, especially at the high end. I want the Gnome CPU Frequency
> applet to be able to set these. (I assume that KDE has/will have
> something similar.)
> 
> I also want to eliminate poor choices for frequency. As I have noted, on
> my T30 with a P4m CPU offering ICH Speedstep and TCC I only get useful
> power reductions when using the lower CPU speed when the frequency
> selected is below the lower available Speedstep setting. (I only have
> two, 1.8 and 1.2 GHz.) I also have a problem in that when TCC and
> Speedstep can provide the same pseudo-frequency at either Speedstep
> setting, the faster CPU setting is chosen. This "costs" me two
> settings. If I ever get a few minutes I'll look at adjusting the source
> to fix this, but I've just been too busy and will likely continue to be
> for a while. (I think you had previously commented on this problem.)

Its part of my TODO list..

> I also need to do more actual testing of CPU performance vs. power
> consumption. I have tested under high CPU load, but not at idle and I
> really need to do that, too.

-- 
Bruno Ducrot

--  Which is worse:  ignorance or apathy?
--  Don't know.  Don't care.