CPU trouble (?)

Forum: Laptops
Topic: CPU trouble (?)
started by: Archdevil

Posted by Archdevil on Feb. 06 2007,15:02

Hello,

Some days ago I installed DSL3.2 on my old notebook Toshiba Satellite 4030CDT and noticed one odd thing -
every boot my CPU is shown as a Celeron Mendocino 151MHz or 150MHz instead of real 300MHz!

Is it normal or not?

Any ideas to fix this?

And one more question - which version of DSL would be the most stable for this notebook?

Posted by Archdevil on Feb. 12 2007,23:34

No ideas? Maybe the CPU will be shown (and will be working) correctly on one of the older releases?

Could anyone tell me which release would be fitting to this laptop mostly?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Feb. 13 2007,03:34

Did you check your BIOS and see if it was underclocked?

Posted by Archdevil on Feb. 13 2007,14:07

Well, as far as the BIOS is concerned it doesn't have any clock settings... The only options about CPU are:
CPU Cache (with write-back or write-through option) and L2 Cache, all enabled.

Posted by lucky13 on Feb. 13 2007,14:52

Quote (Archdevil @ Feb. 06 2007,10:02)

Any ideas to fix this?

And one more question - which version of DSL would be the most stable for this notebook?

There's nothing wrong with your laptop or with DSL. In your power options, you probably have it set for "always on." Intel's speedstep reduces CPU speed by half when the CPU is being underused to reduce battery consumption. That's not a bad thing, imo. You can change that if you want but you're not running at half-speed all the time and changing the setting wouldn't "fix" anything -- just drain your battery faster.

Use the most current version of DSL.

Posted by roberts on Feb. 13 2007,15:46

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.

Posted by Juanito on Feb. 14 2007,03:47

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...

Posted by hs7sv on Feb. 14 2007,07:13

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.

Posted by Juanito on Feb. 14 2007,07:43

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:

DSL: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=14651 >

DSL-N: < http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/f/viewtopic/403.html >

Posted by lucky13 on Feb. 14 2007,16:25

Quote (hs7sv @ Feb. 14 2007,02:13)

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.

Posted by hs7sv on Feb. 15 2007,04:10

lucky13, I'm on learning curve in DSL.
From this topic, It made me know that Power Saving in BIOS setting (Dynamic) doesn't work on DSL.
I agree with you. I will be very happy if I can run DSL longer per battery charge than SuSE or M$ Window$.

Posted by Juanito on Feb. 15 2007,04:52

Quote (hs7sv @ Feb. 15 2007,03:10)

I will be very happy if I can run DSL longer per battery charge than SuSE or M$ Window$.

A quick and dirty way to do this, if you have a speedstep processor, is boot from USB toram and use the following:

# echo 7 > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
# hdparm -Y /dev/hda

This will put your CPU in the slowest, lowest power state and turn off your hd. Your battery will last a long time, but some things (eg compiling drivers) will work more slowly.

Posted by Archdevil on Feb. 25 2007,15:09

Quote (lucky13 @ Feb. 13 2007,09:52)

Thank you a lot! It works after changing power options

Now, the CPU is recognized as 299MHz and the computer works much faster than it used to.

Actually, I always use A/C power so I do not need to worry about the battery.

TU once again