Sorry to revive such an ancient bug, but it still exists.

Like everybody else, I'm on a 1ghz PIII Dell Inspiron 8100. If
/usr/share/powernowd/cpufreq-detect.sh is left to its default of loading
speedstep-smi (which it will), the module will load, but the freezing
when scaling down will persist. That's the original point of the bug
report, as far as I can tell.

Now, the workaround mentioned doesn't REALLY work on the 8100. That is,
if you change /usr/share/powernowd/cpufreq-detect.sh the way Bill Morgan
and a few others said, speedstep-ich is never actually loaded. After
boot, running

lsmod | grep 'speed'

doesn't show any module loaded besides speedstep_lib, which I'm guessing
is a common library between the two speedstep modules.

If you manually boot with the default speedstep-smi, speedstep-smi and
speedstep_lib will be present, along, of course, with the freezing
issue. However, if you later type "sudo modprobe -r speedstep-smi" and
"sudo modprobe speedstep-ich" (that is, to unload one and load the other
manually), it will say "no such device," as at least two other people
above have mentioned it. I'm guessing the reason why MJWood hasn't
experienced this is because he loads the module at startup, which, as
I've mentioned, produces no notable errors, but it also doesn't actually
load the module.

Now, here's the weird part:

If you, as Bill Morgan mentioned, load speedstep-ich at boot (by
changing the aforementioned file), CPU scaling actually works. And it
doesn't freeze, at all. No, as I've said, it doesn't actually load the
module. Strangely enough, though, everything else works: powernowd
scales everything correctly; the little gnome applet shows the CPU at
different levels of scaling. Looking at
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq, the CPU scales
perfectly under various governors and load levels. All while not
freezing anytime it scales up or down in frequency.

I've even tested this by running aircrack-ng and doing a dictionary
attack on packets I've captured (of my own network, mind you). Under 733
Mhz (the lower option), I get around 35 keys/second; under 1 Ghz (the
higher option), I get around 45 keys/second. Switching between the two
frequencies manually causes aircrack-ng to run at these different
speeds. So, everything is pointing to the CPU actually scaling just
fine, although speedstep-ich doesn't work.

I really don't know why this behavior occurs; maybe speedstep-ich
actually does work, but it somehow doesn't show up in lsmod... or load
when called by "modprobe"...

Doing stupid things like writing "PIII_MODULE=speedstep_lib" in cpufreq-
detect.sh doesn't work. Commenting out all PIII_MODULE=whatever lines
(i.e. not loading anything) also doesn't work.

So, it'd be nice to actually get to the bottom of this bug, because the
Dell Inspiron 8100 ALMOST worked just fine out of the box. The only
things driver-wise that kept it from doing so are

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/34043 and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/powernowd/+bug/223812

-- 
Incorrect module loaded on Pentium III Mobile
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/24353
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