Cpupower doesn't set governor on boot

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi,
I followed archwiki to set governor on boot to performance, but it doesn’t work.
My /etc/default/cpupower looks like this:

# Define CPUs governor
# valid governors: ondemand, performance, powersave, conservative, userspace.
governor='performance'

# Limit frequency range
# Valid suffixes: Hz, kHz (default), MHz, GHz, THz
#min_freq="2.25GHz"
#max_freq="3GHz"

# Specific frequency to be set.
# Requires userspace governor to be available.
# Do not set governor field if you use this one.
#freq=

# Utilizes cores in one processor package/socket first before processes are 
# scheduled to other processor packages/sockets.
# See man (1) CPUPOWER-SET for additional details.
#mc_scheduler=

# Utilizes thread siblings of one processor core first before processes are
# scheduled to other cores. See man (1) CPUPOWER-SET for additional details.
#smp_scheduler=

#  Sets a register on supported Intel processore which allows software to convey
# its policy for the relative importance of performance versus energy savings to
# the  processor. See man (1) CPUPOWER-SET for additional details.
#perf_bias=

# vim:set ts=2 sw=2 ft=sh et:

I enabled systemd service with sudo systemctl enable --now cpupower.service, yet after reboot this is cpupower frequency-info output:

analyzing CPU 0:
driver: intel_pstate
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency: Cannot determine or is not supported.
hardware limits: 800 MHz - 4.30 GHz
available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 4.30 GHz.
The governor “powersave” may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
current CPU frequency: 4.10 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
boost state support:
Supported: yes
Active: yes

For my noob’s eye it looks like service works:

systemctl status cpupower

cpupower.service - Apply cpupower configuration
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/cpupower.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (exited) since Thu 2022-06-16 17:21:23 CEST; 14min ago
Process: 500 ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/scripts/cpupower (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 500 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CPU: 4ms
Jun 16 17:21:23 asusB560 systemd[1]: Starting Apply cpupower configuration…
Jun 16 17:21:23 asusB560 systemd[1]: Finished Apply cpupower configuration.

2

Do you by any chance use power-profiles-daemon.service?
If so, there might be some conflict which service is going to be in charge of the cpu scaling.

1 Like
3

I think that you found a culprit, power-profiles-daemon.service is indeed up and running.

  1. Could I safely disable it?
  2. I’m sure I didn’t enable it manually, is it something that comes turned on automatically with DE (Gnome in this case)? If yes something doesn’t work because before running cpupower.service, I tried to change power preferences in gnome settings and it was still powersave.
4

You could if you choose so. However you would lose the GUI integration of it in the Settings and also in the the dropdown “control menu” on the taskbar.

Yes.

I can’t know for sure what it might have been.

If you want to try:

sudo systemctl stop power-profiles-daemon.service
sudo systemctl restart cpupower.service

check:

cpupower frequency-info

If you are happy with the outcome, you would need to mask the daemon because it is a depenency of gnome-control-center and would restart at boot:

sudo systemctl mask power-profiles-daemon.service

If I remember correctly, you might get some warnings of a sort in your journals about the daemon not found or not being able to start or some such. You could ignore those.

If you want to revert the whole thing:

sudo systemctl unmask power-profiles-daemon.service

And then stop-disable the other one.

1 Like
5

I ran

sudo systemctl stop power-profiles-daemon.service
sudo systemctl restart cpupower.service

and

cpupower frequency-info
which changed governor to performance, so I did as you advised and run

sudo systemctl mask power-pofiles-daemon.service

However after reboot, governor changed back to powersave so either power-pofiles-daemon.service wasn’t a problem or I did something wrong.

6

I just noticed that I copied your commands with typo.

There should profiles instead of pofiles

1 Like
7

Sorry for that!

I was staring at the commands thinking that they should have worked and yet I missed the typo!

I will edit and correct it in my post.

8

And now it’s working!
Thanks a lot for support.

1 Like
9

You are welcome!
Glad you got it working!
:enos_flag:

1 Like
10

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