Hello, everybody! I followed the discussion about pro and cons about speed-stepping on a multimedia machine on this list. I'm feeling very uncomfortable sitting in front of an idling computer burning 150Watts of power in the era of global warming when it is so easy to cut the consumption to the half of it - and even more on multicore-machines. I found a solution for me to save energy AND to avoid xruns which may be an option for other people or maybe even an option for a default 64studio-installation.
Gnome includes an applet to easily set the cpu-frequency in userspace, called "frequency scaling monitor". I've got an AMD Athlon64 3000+, so the kernel module "powernow-k8" must be loaded. Two cpufreq-governors seem to be loaded by default without loading another kernel module. These two are "ondemand" and "performance". To use the applet it is useful to activate another scaling-governor, namely "userspace", which can be done with loading the "cpufreq_userspace" module. To have it loaded at boottime I had to write the names of the modules "powernow-k8" and "cpufreq_userspace" to /etc/modules. The last thing to do is to set the SUID-bit to the applet. This can be done through "dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets". Now, it's very easy to switch between CPU-frequencies or even scaling-governors. When I'm working with GIMP or another non-realtime-application, I use "ondemand" and the machine pulls down the frequency if the cpu runs idle. When I'm doing some sound with jack, I start working with the lowest frequency and switch to a faster one if the cpu-power is getting too limited. If I use f.e. a synthy for myself I can live with some xruns. For recording or on liveshows, I'm using "performance" by default, which means that the system is stuck to the highest frequency and I won't get an xrun because of the cpu switching from low to high. Hope, this was useful for someone! Greetings! Mitsch _______________________________________________ 64studio-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.64studio.com/mailman/listinfo/64studio-users
