Re: The SpedStep crash problem ...
On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 05:22:56PM +0100, Alexander Clouter wrote:
> erm a small thing to mention. Speedstep = bollocks (in a word). The reason
> it came about was because macrocroft refused to create a patch that called
> the cpu cooling instruction (HLT) when the machine was idle. This ment
> although your machine is not 100% busy it is 100% active. The HLT command
> tells the CPU to turn off power for a short time to most of the active parts
> on the chip. This increases battery life. Is this *unacceptable*?
No, I think HLT sounds like a much better solution than slowing down the CPU.
What I find unacceptable about the SpeedStep work around with my machine is
that it slows down the CPU. This is not meant in way of "I can't get enough
speed", but more in the way of "I paid for 800Mhz so why should I settle
with 650?". Disabling SpeedStep on my machine means running the CPU at low
speed always. I have been running with this for 4-6 hours now and I have had
no crashes.
<snip>
> Now as I said before and others have said (with damn good reason) turn *OFF*
> speedstep and use HLT instead. <Mr_T> Damn Fool </Mr_T>. If this is *still*
> unacceptable then ask Intel for the nice documentation and write the damn
> support into the kernel yourself. Otherwise learn to use Google and Deja and
> use the linux utility to control speedstep under linux (look under
> alt.comp.portable.linux , if I remember correctly for the thread, it was
> about 2-4 weeks ago).
I don't know what happened to you when you wrote this. Normally I would ignore
this kind of crap you are letting out, but since you are combining it with
some usefull info I will just :-)
Do I need to enable/disable something in the kernel to use HLT? The group you
mention doesn't exist on Google or on my ISPs NNTP server so I guess you
meant comp.os.linux.portable. I find this thread quite relevant:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=3b731299.67587495%40news.kornet.net&prev=/groups%3Fnum%3D25%26hl%3Den%26group%3Dcomp.os.linux.portable%26start%3D400%26group%3Dcomp.os.linux.portable
(sorry for the long URL). CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE is enabled in my kernel, but I
don't get the heavy CPU usage by kapm-idled mentioned. My CONFIG_APM* looks
like this:
CONFIG_APM=m
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND is not set
CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE=y
CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y
# CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT is not set
CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS=y
CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWER_OFF=y
I will try to recompile with CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE changed to n and see what
happens.
> >From a *good* laptop you should get about 3-4 hours battery life from a
> single charge on a single battery. If this doesn't happen get a proper
> laptop and stop treating a laptop like a desktop, you paid an extra $500 or
> so it was small, not so it would be a cosmetic toy that became *unacceptable*
> because you cannot use Google or Deja (aka groups.google.com).
:-)
--
Martin Skøtt
martin@z3n.dk
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