How do I make the CPU scheduler more conservative by default?

ubuntu_ulysses

For some background, I recently found out that for whatever reason that despite my max cpu clock speed was 5.5 GHz, cpupower was configured to not allow it to go beyond 3 GHz for whatever reason. Naturally I set cpupower frequency-set -u 5.5G to utilize my processor to its full capabilities, expecting the powersave governor to scale it sensibly and only go to 5.5 when needed but it doesn't do that at al. It then idles at about 5 GHz with only 5%...

Originally asked by Zorf on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Just do nothing. Your "5.5 GHz max clock speed" is misleading, and probably a turbo speed that gets selected for very short (micro to milliseconds) burst of high load when CPU cores are neither limited by waiting for RAM or other cores, nor thermally limited. All relevant modern Linux distros ship configurations that usually "just do the right thing" for desktop usage. The symptoms you describe are exactly what you get by trying to smarter; you're probably now using more power for the same performance by going back to the more rigid old ondemand governor. Don't do that; stick with a sensible, distribution kernel and its defaults. idle around 1 GHz and only go to around the 5 under heavy...

Full answer by Marcus Müller: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/807203 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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