freqency scaling on compaq nx9010

DISCUSSION Thomas Eschenbacher 2 participants 4 messages Jan 9, 2005 – Jan 13, 2005 3 messages not in the archive ACPI

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Thomas Eschenbacher

author

2005-01-09 22:47 UTC #0 lore raw

Hi,

I have a compaq nx9010 laptop, running on kernel 2.4.9-gentoo-r13, with ACPI enabled and speedstep for frequency scaling. Speedstep itself works rather fine, but I wonder about the available scaling frequencies:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies gives only "668000 692000" ?

...and this is also what speedstep does - it switches between these two frequencies, 96% and 100% speed. Isn't this absolutely nonsense? Only 4% speed difference !?

I now have fixed the bios' DSDT and built my own one in the kernel - no change. Furthermore I cannot find the numbers 668000, 692000, 668 and 692, neither in decimal, nor in hex in the decompiled dsdt.

On the other hand my dsdt contains two entries in the _PSS section, one for 3059MHz (100%) and one for 1596MHz (~50%) - but those two frequencies appear nowhere in /proc or /sys/devices/... !?

what goes wrong here ?

Is speedstep independend from ACPI ?

Thomas

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Dominik Brodowski

2005-01-09 22:56 UTC #2 lore raw

Hi,

Please post the contents of all files in
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/

Quoted 4 lines · Thomas Eschenbacher

Hi,
I have a compaq nx9010 laptop, running on kernel 2.4.9-gentoo-r13, with ACPI enabled and speedstep for frequency scaling.

Which variant of speedstep?

Quoted 3 lines

...and this is also what speedstep does - it switches between these two frequencies, 96% and 100% speed. Isn't this absolutely nonsense? Only 4% speed difference !?

It most likely is nonsense...

Quoted 3 lines

On the other hand my dsdt contains two entries in the _PSS section, one for 3059MHz (100%) and one for 1596MHz (~50%) - but those two frequencies appear nowhere in /proc or /sys/devices/... !?

What does using the acpi-cpufreq driver lead to?

Quoted 1 line

Is speedstep independend from ACPI ?

It depends on the driver and sometimes on driver settings whether it is independend from ACPI or not.

Dominik

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Thomas Eschenbacher

author

2005-01-10 00:33 UTC #4 lore raw

Quoted 4 lines · Dominik Brodowski

[...]
Quoted 1 line
I have a compaq nx9010 laptop, running on kernel 2.6.9-gentoo-r13, with ACPI enabled and speedstep for frequency scaling.
Which variant of speedstep?

The file "scaling_driver" told me it was "speedstep-smi". (which makes no sense to me, I have an ALI and no Intel chipset...) No idea what it really was, I saw no kernel message about speedstep or so.
(ACPI version is 20040816)

Quoted 4 lines

[...]
Quoted 1 line
On the other hand my dsdt contains two entries in the _PSS section, one for 3059MHz (100%) and one for 1596MHz (~50%) - but those two frequencies appear nowhere in /proc or /sys/devices/... !?
What does using the acpi-cpufreq driver lead to?

...to success :-) Great, this was the right hint!

I kicked out all speedstep stuff from my kernel config and now I see 30590000 and 15960000 in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies - the same values as in my DSDT, using acpi-cpufreq as driver.

So what would be the advantage of speedstep over acpi-cpufreq ? Does it also switch core voltage or do other things?

thanks for the quick reply and the help,
Thomas

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Dominik Brodowski

2005-01-13 15:08 UTC #6 lore raw

Quoted 5 lines · Thomas Eschenbacher

The file "scaling_driver" told me it was "speedstep-smi". (which makes no sense to me, I have an ALI and no Intel chipset...) No idea what it really was, I saw no kernel message about speedstep or so.
(ACPI version is 20040816)

Then you used the wrong speedstep-driver, AFAICS. It is only meant for mobile Pentium III CPUs... I need to check why it didn't fail to load.

Quoted 7 lines

I kicked out all speedstep stuff from my kernel config and now I see 30590000 and 15960000 in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies - the same values as in my DSDT, using acpi-cpufreq as driver.
So what would be the advantage of speedstep over acpi-cpufreq ? Does it also switch core voltage or do other things?

The acpi-cpufreq driver (normally) also scales voltage, it may just be slower than speedstep-ich or speedstep-centrino. However, it's ot faster or slower than speedstep-smi.

Dominik