Sony Vaio and Pentium 4 Mobile power management questions

pkxl2 · n00b Joined: 04 Nov 2003 Posts: 15 Location: Germany

Hi out there,

got me a rather nicely working Sony Vaio PCG-GRX416G, and hammered gentoo into it

The whole apparatus works fine, with Jogdial, Wireless, Cardreader, ACPI Battery states and the whole laptop shit on a 2.6.0 Kernel

My questions are within the unexplored plains of power management. As it seems the speedfreq Daemon runs rather nicely, but the ICH Speedstep only supports the frequencies 1200 and 1800 MHz. Is this a "feature" of the Pentium 4 Mobile (yes it's a P4M 1800, no Centrino) or is it possible to get frequencies beetween 1200-1800 (ex. 1500 or so)?

The other thing is the ACPI Throttling. I got a throttling file in proc/acpi/processor/CPU0 and can echo states into it. when I do a

gwlinden · Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 6:50 pm Post subject:

Same here, but then the opposite: I set the governer to "powersave", and /proc/cpuinfo tells me the CPU is running at 250 MHz (instead of 2 GHz), while /proc/acpi tells me the throttling is still way up at state T0.

It seems the cpufreq and acpi throttling are two different animals...

BTW, I have an Asus L3800S laptop with a P4, running 2.6.0-test10.

I would like to know why this is too.
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Gwendolyn

jetblack · Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 9:10 pm Post subject:

I think that Speedstep only supports two frequencies, corresponding to "AC" and "battery". There is a nice explanation of all of the processor power management stuff (power, throttling, sleep, speedstep) here. I hope it helps clear up some of these questions - it is a bit confusing.

drakos7 · Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2003 6:32 pm Post subject:

I have the seen the same. I am quite certain that only those 2 frequencies are supported by the chip. You cannot set it to a random freq. Only 1200 or 1600 (in my case, 1800 in yours)

pkxl2 · n00b Joined: 04 Nov 2003 Posts: 15 Location: Germany

jetblacks comment was of much help, the link he provided told me everything I wanted to know! Thank you!

I will fool around a bit with these informations and tell you if I find something useful (and battery-prolonging

)
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AeonFlux - AMD 1800+XP 512 RAM - gs-2.4.21
Shakira - Sony Vaio P4M 1800 512 RAM - 2.6.6-rc3-love
bong - AMD 900 768 RAM - 2.4.26-rc1
wau - Alpha MIATA PW600AU 1,5GB RAM - 2.4.26-rc1

pkxl2 · n00b Joined: 04 Nov 2003 Posts: 15 Location: Germany

Okay, some updates now.

I've finally been able to catch up with Larry. Now I've control over the CPU Performance of my P4M. I still don't know why the older kernel won't let me set the cpu frequency myself (got the feeling that it sets to 1800 if on wall power, 1200 on Battery, I also read some rants from people sharing this opinion) But now, with the linux-2.6.6-rc3-love4 Love-Kernel nearly everything is under control.

I tested the settings with nbench, 'cause I trust the VAIO internal reports as much as I can throw a cray (throwing the notebook would be contraproductive, as it would fly somewhat far)

With POWERSAVE Governor (1200MHz)