Linux Mint Forums

Anyone know how I force Cpufreq to use the powersave governor all of the time? I change it manually but every time it comes out of suspend it is reverting back to ondemand.

xircon wrote:Anyone know how I force Cpufreq to use the powersave governor all of the time? I change it manually but every time it comes out of suspend it is reverting back to ondemand.

You should leave it as is. If there's demand "ondemand" scales up and the work can be done faster and the CPU may go back earlier to higher sleep states, therefore ondemand uses less power as powersave.

Anyway, for recent enough Intel CPU, ondemand is the one recommended for power efficiency (over userspace, and even over "powersave") by the Intel's kernel developer Arjan van de Ven (see [1], [2], [3])

For further readings: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_ma ... cy_Scaling

The problem is that my laptop is overheating, due to the power regression problem and the open source AMD/ATI drivers. It seems to heat up less on powersave.

xircon wrote:The problem is that my laptop is overheating, due to the power regression problem and the open source AMD/ATI drivers. It seems to heat up less on powersave.

What I would try:

- kernel 2.6.39-bpo.2-amd64
from the Debian backports repo with pcie_aspm=force
(gives me 6 W when idle and about 6 h of surfing with slightly reduced brightness and wifi on while being dead quiet at 41 to 45 °C)
- or the latest liquorix kernel (3.1....) with Matthew Garrett's new patches already used (liquorix.net)

and

- disable ATI graphic card (bios) and use the build-in HD3000 (ATI/AMD drivers suck, that's one reason why I switched to a pure i5-2 design with no additional graphics after 2 years with an AMD/ATI system)
- or try the latest proprietary AMD Catalyst driver (on your own risk ... )

stay tuned

this seems to be a regulaer issue with linux in general (over heating)

my battery life is very poor when running any flavour of linux where as the battery life is rather normal / excellent while running any of the windows (xp, vista and win7)

my cpu temperatures go up to 55-57 degrees on any flavour of linux where as on windows7 it stays at a cool 37 degrees on both cores (hence why the battery lasts longer because of so much less fan activity)

there has been so much talk about power and over heating issues with linux since 2.6.38 kernels and as far as i know and from experiance, nothing has been improved ever since (other then kernel hacks and patches).

alot of people state that the power and heating is caused more of because of late linux has so many more extra process running in the back ground etc. but in reality, so does windows

Since mint 11 (on this lappy), power and heating issues have gone from bad to worse and even more worse on mint12 ...