Comment 4 for bug 368809

I've discovered that the behaviour of the CPU frequency settings has changed. The monitor applet offers 4 settings: "conservative", "ondemand", "performance", and "powersave".

Previously, the "ondemand" setting only pushed cpu frequency up to 100% when I invoked a foreground process, like indexing a lot of usenet articles. Boinc processes niced at 19, which ran all the time, were run at a lower frequency.

Now, "ondemand" seems to run Boinc (NI 19) at 100%, and when boinc is not running and I invoke other processes (NI 0) it seems, subjectively, much slower to push up to 100% than before, though that might be a function of the monitor applet.

As far as I can see on my PC, there isn't any practical difference between "conservative" and "powersave", nor between "ondemand" and "performance" when I'm running something like boinc that runs continually.

I haven't yet located the documentation that defines these governors and how they should work.