[LAU] OnDemand-performance was(OT: klang)

[Robin Gareus]

On 08/05/2012 10:04 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-08-05 at 21:39 +0200, Jeremy Jongepier wrote:
>> Just added this to the LinuxMusicians Wiki:
>> http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=system_configuration#cpu_frequency_scaling
> 
>         "The command in your /etc/rc.local file only works if you
>         disable the ondemand service. On Debian systems:
>         
>         sudo update-rc.d ondemand disable
>         
>         Another option would be to modify the ondemand init script and
>         rename it to performance:
>         
>         sudo sed -i 's/ondemand/performance/g' /etc/init.d/ondemand
>         sudo update-rc.d ondemand disable
>         sudo cp /etc/init.d/ondemand /etc/init.d/performance
>         sudo update-rc.d performance enable"
> 
> Last time I used Debian there was a script /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils that
> set up the governor to ondemand. It's not that long ago, so I guess for
> Debian this didn't change. Len of course refers to Ubuntu (Studio).
> AV Linux (Debian) also has got /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils:
> 
> "[snip]
> # Set ENABLE to "true" to let the script run at boot time.
> # 
> # eg:	ENABLE="true"
> #	GOVERNOR="ondemand"
> #	MAX_SPEED=1000
> #	MIN_SPEED=500
> 
> ENABLE="true"
> GOVERNOR="performance"
> MAX_SPEED="0"
> MIN_SPEED="0"
> [snip]"
> 
> I once wrote a script to toggle between ondemand and performance, not
> only for the session, but also to keep it for next startup, based
> on /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils.
> 
> Regards,
> Ralf
> 

I really wonder why you are all raving about this.

Well, it is hard to generalize but on most modern CPUs + main-boards CPU
frequency scaling is _not_ correlated to audio-dropouts [anymore] and a
non-issue.

The time it takes to change CPU frequencies is very small compared (us)
to [even] low-latency audio (ms). Concerning Hardware, these days,
bus-power-management is most often the cause of xruns on idle systems
followed by SMI.

Disable PCI and/or PCIe power-management in the BIOS and also disable
EIST and C1E halt-states; and, the 'ondemand' governor will works just fine.

If you have an unlimited supply of power and noise of cooling
the system is of no concern: sure, use the 'performance' CPU-freq
governor -- reducing the number of possibilities in complex systems
usually increases reliability... which is indeed a good thing for audio.

ciao,
robin

NB. frequency scaling _can_ be an issue when using jack2 (or tschak) on
a multi-core machine: The total system-load (over all CPUs) may still be
too low for the CPU governor to react, while DSP load is already at the
limit. -- http://rg42.org/oss/jackfreqd/