From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dominik Brodowski Subject: speedstep-smi woes Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:20:46 +0100 Sender: cpufreq-bounces@www.linux.org.uk Message-ID: <20031118182046.GA5950@brodo.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: cpufreq-bounces@www.linux.org.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: cpufreq@www.linux.org.uk Under heavy load speedstep-smi generates "cpufreq: change failed" messages at least on two systems, one of them my own. I've tried to evaluate how to avoid these failures: - wbinvd() has no positive effect - disabling bus master arbitration (io-port 0x22 on 440bx) has no positive effect - mdelay(250) immediately before the asm smi call has resulted in _zero_ failures. However, in most cases, even under heavy load, the speedstep-smi driver _does_ achieve speedstep transitions. So, how to proceed? a) Try to avoid these failures, even if the cost of all transitions is 250ms then? This practically disables dynamic frequency scaling for speedstep-smi. b) Do the same as before: this means that sometimes the frequency isn't changed even though the user or the dynamic frequency scaling governor demands a higher frequency. Also, the "speedstep_init" step tends to fail sometimes. Dominik