More head scratching after Zen update

Issues & Assistance GNOME
1

Back on 5 December I posted Slow system after update. Long story short, my laptop was locked at 400MHz following an update of the Zen kernel.

In the end I downloaded CPUpower and this revealed that the driver had been changed to amd-pstate...

cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: amd-pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 131 us
  hardware limits: 400 MHz - 4.06 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative ondemand userspace powersave performance schedutil
  current policy: frequency should be within 400 MHz and 4.06 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 409 MHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes
    AMD PSTATE Highest Performance: 255. Maximum Frequency: 4.06 GHz.
    AMD PSTATE Nominal Performance: 132. Nominal Frequency: 2.10 GHz.
    AMD PSTATE Lowest Non-linear Performance: 70. Lowest Non-linear Frequency: 1.11 GHz.
    AMD PSTATE Lowest Performance: 26. Lowest Frequency: 400 MHz.

I got things working correctly after a lot of help and head scratching. I was happy that my laptop idled at 400MHz as it was good for battery life.

I updated the kernel again earlier today, and my laptop has reverted to idling at 1.4GHZ...

cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  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: 1.40 GHz - 4.06 GHz
  available frequency steps:  2.10 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.40 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative ondemand userspace powersave performance schedutil
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.40 GHz and 2.10 GHz.
                  The governor "conservative" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 1.40 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: no

I am at a loss.

:confused:

2

The driver went back to acpi-cpufreq.
Do you still have the kernel boot parameter initcall_blacklist=acpi_cpufreq_init you set in the past?
Indeed cpupower was recently updated, but I'm not able to say what changed, being a kernel tool...
https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/cpupower/

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply.

I'm going to leave things as they are. My laptop is currently working without issue @1.4GHz, if at sometime in the future it reverts back to 400MHz after an update it will hopefully cause no problems.

:crossed_fingers: