Slacy’s Blog

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my Lenovo S10 (Intel Atom N270 @ 1.6GHz) netbook, and have had some serious performance issues after installing.  Others have noticed similar issues.

In short, the machine never goes any faster than 800MHz, no matter what I’m doing.  What’s supposed to be happening is that the cpufreq module (now compiled into the kernel instead of a loadable module) should be increasing the processor speed when it detects high CPU usage.  For all intents and purposes, this feature is 100% broken on my machine.   I can manually override the cpufreq governor to set it to “performance” and the machine becomes a fair bit more responsive, but uses a lot more power.

It does look like there are several ways to make the default policy “performance” and for the short term, I’m going to be doing this so that my machine works at a reasonable pace.

I’ve also filed a bug with launchpad.net and we’ll see if that gets any traction.  There does seem to be a large number of “cpufreq stuck” types of bugs in launchpad, which is very discouraging. Even worse, /etc/init.d/loadcpufreq seems to not have been updated to reflect that acpi_cpufreq is now compiled into the kernel.  This is just sloppy.

I also suspect that this “hidden bug” is effecting a *lot* more 9.04 users than people think.  In general, when a fast 3GHz machine “only” runs at 1.5GHz, it’s a perfectly fine situation and most users won’t notice it.   But, when a 1.6GHz machine is stuck at 800Mhz, it’s a pretty big deal.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.