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Bug#110273: ITP: lvcool -- "cools" the AMD K7 (Athlon/Duron) CPU



On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 03:08:21PM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> Package: lvcool
> Description: "cools" the AMD K7 (Athlon/Duron) CPU
>  This little utility will cool your Athlon/Duron processor on Via
>  KT133 or KX133(A) (VT8363 or VT8371/VT82C686x) chipsets during idle
>  states. It switches to STPGNT mode and works "more effective" than
>  kernels HLT command.

I don't think lvcool is very usable in the current form. First, it's
very experimental - it's known that it causes problems on some machines,
but it's not known on which ones.

Then, the user space lvcool program contains an idle loop in user space.
(ie, it contains an infinite loop which just puts the processor in a
deep sleep mode whenever it gets scheduled).
Though it runs with high nice value, it still has huge impact on some
operation. For example on my machine, opening a mailbox with mutt on a
nfs mounted volume is at least two times slower when lvcool is running.

I posted a kernel patch on linux-kernel to include lvcools functionality
in the kernels idle loop, with some promising results. But this patch
is even more experimental, as I'm not a professional kernel hacker and it's
only tested on my computer.

Jan




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