[OpenIndiana-discuss] powerd/speedstep configuration

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-11-22 11:39, Jonathan Adams wrote:
> I'm on a laptop with an Intel CPU, and speedstep works to push the CPU
> up a lot when needed, however I can't help feeling that it seems very
> eager to raise the CPU speed to the top whack, when all I've got open
> is Firefox and Thunderbird, not doing anything much.

On my laptop I increased the threshold from 1s to 3s, so the clock
bump happens later, but intermittent bursts of activity (like
rendering a new browser page) often get leveled out before being
noticed and causing the clock step. At least, that's what I like
to believe and couldn't prove or disprove ;)

Also note that the tools you can use to poll the system (like top,
dtrace, prstat, possibly powertop) are somewhat compute-intensive
and can cause the clock bump on their own. Like in quantum mechanics -
the act of looking at a system changes its state so you don't really
know what it is like when you're not looking at it =)

//Jim