Generic kernel does not scale down CPU frequency

[Markus Kienast]

When I am using generic kernel the CPU frequency is never scaled down! It always stays ar 1.87 GHz. Still, booting up takes considerably longer than with the 386 kernel.

Now you sure want lshw, lspci, lswhatever to be attached to this bug. I certainly understand why you need that, but I do not understand why I have to do the same step over and over again! I should be able to attach HW info to my launchpad profile, so I don't have to upload it again and again!

If you are an active bug fixer, please have a look at the following feature requests which could make your life so much easier!
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/135542
https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/3382

[Markus Kienast (elias1884)]

This might be related to bug #118765.

The reason for my assumption is, that when I look at frequency scaling related places in /proc everything seems to be normal. It appears that there is just never low enough CPU load to scale the frequency down. And this I believe is due to the generic kernel misbehaving. It seems only very little CPU time is available for tasks and the rest is blocked by something or wasted on some process gone insane.

I think that, because some things used to behave in a way that led to the conclusion that my processes were handled intermittently.

[Markus Kienast (elias1884)]

"cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors" reveals this:
powersave ondemand userspace conservative performance

When I switch through the governors CPU frequencies are actually scaled. However either max or min are used. I checked scaling_available_frequencies and there are the same frequencies defined as with the 386 kernel, where frequency scaling works fine, they are just never used.

ondemand and performance governor lead to the max frequency used all time and powersave does lead to the min frequency to be used all time. I think userspace resulted in min frequency as well.

Still no idea why all this happens.

[Markus Kienast (elias1884)]

This bug would also benefit from resolving bug #3382.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

Without specifying the version of your kernel and Ubuntu, this bug report isn't very helpful..