ondemand init script sets governor "powersave" when only "powersave" and "performance" available

[Shahar Or]

My system seems to have governors "powersave" and "performance" available. No others.

So by ondemand, I end up with "powersave", which makes my workstation excruciatingly slow.

I think that in this case, "performance" should be preferred.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: initscripts 2.88dsf-59.2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.1.0-2.2-generic 4.1.3
Uname: Linux 4.1.0-2-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.18-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Fri Jul 31 17:08:08 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-10-12 (1752 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
SourcePackage: sysvinit
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to wily on 2014-11-11 (262 days ago)
mtime.conffile..etc.init.d.ondemand: 2015-07-31T16:51:58.391407

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

Only interactive, ondemand and powersave appear to be handled:

  *interactive*)
   GOVERNOR="interactive"
   break
   ;;
  *ondemand*)
   GOVERNOR="ondemand"
   break
   ;;
  *powersave*)
   GOVERNOR="powersave"
   break
   ;;

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This behavior is a deliberate result of the change made for bug #1314653. Assigning to the developers responsible for that change. Colin, Tim, please evaluate whether a more nuanced selection of scaling governor is required.

[Armin Rigo (arigo-w)]

May I also chime in? If I wanted my machine to run at Celeron speed, I would not have bought a core i5. I think it makes no sense to select the "powersave" governors by default without telling the user in any way. Any non-expert user will not know why his machine runs 2x more slowly on Linux than Windows. It sounds like a very good reason to drop Linux (or, maybe, try a different distribution).

I have read somewhere that intel-pstate's new "performance" is nicely engineered to cover most use cases; unlike the old "performance" it doesn't mean the machine will always consume as much power as possible. In fact the new "performance" consumes less power than the old "ondemand". The latter disappeared because the new "performance" covers the same use cases and more.

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Since the /etc/init.d/ondemand script has many other issues, including overriding the settings prepared by /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils, I think that the best option should be removing it.

[Greg Mason (gmason)]

This is also the problem behind bug 1579278 which recently affected an IS machine. Forcing "powersave" on all newer x86 CPUs is a bug.