Yes, indeed. Many laptops have power saving by reducing the cpu.
My thinkpad when running from battery defaults to half speed. There is a BIOS setting to always use full speed.I don't think this is anything to do with the Speedstep settings unless you have a way to permenently set them in BIOS - what I see with my machine is that it will always boot in the highest speedstep setting. Even if I set the CPU to the lowest setting, it will switch back to the highest setting on re-boot.
You can check the setting by:
cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
Under DSL my CPU is reported as 1.6GHz, 64MB cache but under DSL-N it is (correctly) reported as 1.6GHz, 2048MB cache - there does not seem to be a difference in performance though...My laptop is running at its slowest speed on DSL also. You can check the current MHz by:-
cat /proc/cpuinfo
My BIOS setting is to Dynamic. It works on openSUSE 10.2 but it doesn't work on DSL-3.2 and DSL-2.1b. I'm searching for the way to set processor running at its fastest speed or adjusted dynamically. By highest, I meant highest power consumption (i.e. fastest speed). If you have a speedstep processor, you can change the power consumption/speed by:
echo x > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
Where, on my machine, 1 >= x >= 7
It is possible to adjust the speedstep settings dynamically but this is much easier under Linux 2.6.x (DSL-N) than Linux 2.4.x (DSL), see:
My laptop is running at its slowest speed on DSL also....
Are you making apple-to-apple comparisons running the same applications under the same window manager, etc.? It figures your laptop would run a lot "slower" under DSL because DSL doesn't have the same overhead that a larger distro like SuSE has. That will account for a lot of difference. All it means is that you can run DSL longer per battery charge than SuSE or whatever else runs your CPU full steam.
I don't understand why some of you seem to consider it a "problem" that your CPU speed varies according to the demands placed on it by an operating system and the applications being run. I consider that a benefit regardless of what I'm running, especially if I need more than a couple hours between plugging it in.Next Page...
original here.
