[OpenIndiana-discuss] powerd/speedstep configuration

[Jonathan Adams]

On 22 November 2012 13:34, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:
> 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 =)

It seems better, not sure if it is; I'll only work that out over time/use.

I didn't know about powertop, nice, but yes I know about "resource
meters" ... I've seen some bad ones in the past that used 100% CPU
when running ...

Watching powertop, it appears that hovering the mouse over any firefox
window seems to cause powertop to register changed CPU speeds,
wherther or not that's related to me having i915 graphics in this
thing, I don't know.

Jon