CPU frequency and voltage scaling code in the Linux(TM) kernel L i n u x C P U F r e q U S E R G U I D E Dominik Brodowski Clock scaling allows you to change the clock speed of the CPUs on the fly. This is a nice method to save battery power, because the lower the clock speed, the less power the CPU consumes. Contents: --------- 1. Supported Architectures and Processors 1.1 ARM 1.2 x86 1.3 sparc64 1.4 ppc 1.5 SuperH 2. "Policy" / "Governor"? 2.1 Policy 2.2 Governor 3. How to change the CPU cpufreq policy and/or speed 3.1 Preferred interface: sysfs 3.2 Deprecated interfaces 1. Supported Architectures and Processors ========================================= 1.1 ARM ------- The following ARM processors are supported by cpufreq: ARM Integrator ARM-SA1100 ARM-SA1110 1.2 x86 ------- The following processors for the x86 architecture are supported by cpufreq: AMD Elan - SC400, SC410 AMD mobile K6-2+ AMD mobile K6-3+ AMD mobile Duron AMD mobile Athlon AMD Opteron AMD Athlon 64 Cyrix Media GXm Intel mobile PIII and Intel mobile PIII-M on certain chipsets Intel Pentium 4, Intel Xeon Intel Pentium M (Centrino) National Semiconductors Geode GX Transmeta Crusoe Transmeta Efficeon VIA Cyrix 3 / C3 various processors on some ACPI 2.0-compatible systems [*] [*] Only if "ACPI Processor Performance States" are available to the ACPI<->BIOS interface. 1.3 sparc64 ----------- The following processors for the sparc64 architecture are supported by cpufreq: UltraSPARC-III 1.4 ppc ------- Several "PowerBook" and "iBook2" notebooks are supported. 1.5 SuperH ---------- The following SuperH processors are supported by cpufreq: SH-3 SH-4 2. "Policy" / "Governor" ? ========================== Some CPU frequency scaling-capable processor switch between various frequencies and operating voltages "on the fly" without any kernel or user involvement. This guarantees very fast switching to a frequency which is high enough to serve the user's needs, but low enough to save power. 2.1 Policy ---------- On these systems, all you can do is select the lower and upper frequency limit as well as whether you want more aggressive power-saving or more instantly available processing power. 2.2 Governor ------------ On all other cpufreq implementations, these boundaries still need to be set. Then, a "governor" must be selected. Such a "governor" decides what speed the processor shall run within the boundaries. One such "governor" is the "userspace" governor. This one allows the user - or a yet-to-implement userspace program - to decide what specific speed the processor shall run at. 3. How to change the CPU cpufreq policy and/or speed ==================================================== 3.1 Preferred Interface: sysfs ------------------------------ The preferred interface is located in the sysfs filesystem. If you mounted it at /sys, the cpufreq interface is located in a subdirectory "cpufreq" within the cpu-device directory (e.g. /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ for the first CPU). cpuinfo_min_freq : this file shows the minimum operating frequency the processor can run at(in kHz) cpuinfo_max_freq : this file shows the maximum operating frequency the processor can run at(in kHz) scaling_driver : this file shows what cpufreq driver is used to set the frequency on this CPU scaling_available_governors : this file shows the CPUfreq governors available in this kernel. You can see the currently activated governor in scaling_governor, and by "echoing" the name of another governor you can change it. Please note that some governors won't load - they only work on some specific architectures or processors. scaling_min_freq and scaling_max_freq show the current "policy limits" (in kHz). By echoing new values into these files, you can change these limits. If you have selected the "userspace" governor which allows you to set the CPU operating frequency to a specific value, you can read out the current frequency in scaling_setspeed. By "echoing" a new frequency into this you can change the speed of the CPU, but only within the limits of scaling_min_freq and scaling_max_freq. 3.2 Deprecated Interfaces ------------------------- Depending on your kernel configuration, you might find the following cpufreq-related files: /proc/cpufreq /proc/sys/cpu/*/speed /proc/sys/cpu/*/speed-min /proc/sys/cpu/*/speed-max These are files for deprecated interfaces to cpufreq, which offer far less functionality. Because of this, these interfaces aren't described here.