From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 Description of problem: I have a IBM Thinkpad T23 which has a clean install of Fedora Core 2. It is running noticably slower, and looking at /proc/cpuinfo, it seems that the 1.2 GHz processor is running at 800 MHz. It seems that the speedstep is permanently set to a lower CPU frequency -- even when the machine is plugged in and lots of applications are running. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot FC2 2. Look at /proc/cpuinfo 3. Actual Results: running at slower speed than it should be Additional info:
Created attachment 100618 [details] output of cat /proc/cpuinfo > cpuinfo.txt cpuinfo
1) does this go away if you do chkconfig --level 345 cpuspeed off cpuspeed is the speedstep daemon that will slow the cpu down when the machine is idle. It's possible that its somewhat mistuned for you system. If you're up for it you can tweak the configuration file; http://carlthompson.net/Software/CPUSpeed is the homepage of the program, /etc/cpuspeed.conf the configuration file.
I've stopped cpuspeed as above and rebooted, and the first time, it showed it running at 1.2 GHz, but now, it is back to 800 MHz. I am not sure of what is changed, as cpuspeed is not running now (as shown from ps -aef).
Ok, I think I understand what I am seeing. With cpuspeed disabled, if I boot with the laptop on battery power, I get 800 MHz all the time, even if I later plug it in. if I boot with the laptop plugged in, I get 1.2 GHz. I guess the BIOS sets the initial speed, and without the cpuspeed daemon working properly, there is no change when I switch between battery and outlet power.
I think there are files under /sys that you can use to change the CPU speed from the command line (as root). Right now I'm on a PowerBook G3 (fixed at max CPU speed) so I'll have to refresh my memory on the details later. (Actually, cpufreq support for this PB G3 would be a nice enhancement, but that's unrelated to this bug.) Or, you could enable cpuspeed and then "killall -SIGUSR1 cpuspeed" to have it lock the CPU at 1.2GHz. Then "killall -SIGHUP cpuspeed" to put it back in the default automatic mode (where it will kick the speed up if the load stays high for maybe several seconds, IIRC).
Generally cpuspeed will do the right thing anyway - as load rises it will speed up the CPU. Its got command line options to let you select policy. See cpuspeed -h