3.2.3. Tuning CPUfreq Policy and Speed

⁠3.2.3. Tuning CPUfreq Policy and Speed

Once you have chosen an appropriate CPUfreq governor, you can view CPU speed and policy information with the cpupower frequency-info command and further tune the speed of each CPU with options for cpupower frequency-set.

For cpupower frequency-info, the following options are available:

--freq — Shows the current speed of the CPU according to the CPUfreq core, in KHz.
--hwfreq — Shows the current speed of the CPU according to the hardware, in KHz (only available as root).
--driver — Shows what CPUfreq driver is used to set the frequency on this CPU.
--governors — Shows the CPUfreq governors available in this kernel. If you wish to use a CPUfreq governor that is not listed in this file, refer to Section 3.2.2, “CPUfreq Setup” for instructions on how to do so.
--affected-cpus — Lists CPUs that require frequency coordination software.
--policy — Shows the range of the current CPUfreq policy, in KHz, and the currently active governor.
--hwlimits — Lists available frequencies for the CPU, in KHz.

For cpupower frequency-set, the following options are available:

--min <freq> and --max <freq> — Set the policy limits of the CPU, in KHz.
Important
When setting policy limits, you should set --max before --min.
--freq <freq> — Set a specific clock speed for the CPU, in KHz. You can only set a speed within the policy limits of the CPU (as per --min and --max).
--governor <gov> — Set a new CPUfreq governor.

Alternative to cpupower

If you do not have the kernel-tools package installed, CPUfreq settings can be viewed in the tunables found in /sys/devices/system/cpu/[cpuid]/cpufreq/. Settings and values can be changed by writing to these tunables. For example, to set the minimum clock speed of cpu0 to 360 KHz, use:

echo 360000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq