starting from kde 4.5 beta2, under Power Management -> Edit Profiles -> <profilename> -> CPU and System, the cpu scaling governor listbox has gone away substituted by a checkbox labeled "Enable system power saving". How can I select now, into a profile, a "Performance" or "ondemand" CPU scaling governator? There are works in progress in this module?

cpufreq-info output:
...
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
...

This is no longer possible unfortunately. I believe it was done due to lobbying by some distributions... you may wish to ask drf__ in #solid if there is another way to do this.

Thanks for the information

I believe it was done due to lobbying by some distributions...

Who was lobbying for this? Can you provide some more info or links about this decision?

This was primarily the result of work by Holger Macht and was additionally encouraged by Fedora also.

The thread was called "[PATCH] powerdevil-remove-cpufreq.patch" on the kde-devel mailing list.

Thanks for the info. I can still set it with

Code: Select all

solid-powermanagement set cpufreq

so no big deal. Just wanted to see what the rationale was for removing the option.

I just found out about this, and I'm furious.
Since when does KDE completely remove options from the GUI because they could be "confusing" to the user?

I the past, this was something that Gnome would do, and it was one of the main reasons I always preferred KDE. It gave me more control, gave me freedom of choice and didn't treat me like an idiot.

Is KDE going to turn into a piece of software that was written for idiots that shouldn't be given too much control because they could break stuff? What kind of logic is that?

Where can I complain about this stupid decision?

The correct place to complain about this decision is the KDE Bug Tracker.

This was not removed due to being "confusing" but because the downstream distributions pressured their KDE teams to encourage the feature to be removed. I don't know why the Kernel/Power Management teams of those distributions did this however.

It's probably because the current "recommended" way is to always use the ondemand governor, in all cases.

On modern CPUs it saves most power, because it it allows the CPU to enter an energy saving sleep state more often.

See an explanation here: http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/power/go ... tices.html

I can understand the decision a bit now, but still I don't like functionality being removed.

Especially since I had to manually enable "ondemand" after upgrading to 4.5 - the CPU was running on full-power all the time.

Especially since I had to manually enable "ondemand" after upgrading to 4.5 - the CPU was running on full-power all the time.

Maybe this would be a good spot to explain how you manually enable 'ondemand"?

My tower is often idling overnight with the fan running on full. It sure would be nice to throttle down. Thank you.

When using KDE simply run

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solid-powermanagement set cpufreq ondemand

You can go to "Power Management" -> "Edit Profiles" in System Settings and enter this command in the "When loading profile execute:" box.

For an alternate way to set the scaling governor, see here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cpufreq#Scaling_governors

By the way, does anybody know what the "Enable system power saving" checkbox does?

Thank you for the reply.

I've pasted <solid-powermanagement set cpufreq ondemand> into the "When loading profile execute:" box. I've checked "Enable system power saving" in case it needs to be selected for the execute command to become active. Other than that, no, I have no idea what "Enable system power saving" does.

Fingers crossed. I'll check out that link to archlinux a bit later today.

Edit: ok, that doesn't seem to have worked. I'm using debian (sidux) KDE 4.5.1. Maybe I don't have a package installed that I should have?

The "Enable System Power Saving" switches to the ondemand governor I think.

It didn't work for me, though.

solid-powermanagement isn't available for me. It says its not installed, but when I try to install it, it says is is installed!

----------------------------------------

root@NX9420:/home/me# solid-powermanagement set cpufreq
The program 'solid-powermanagement' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
apt-get install kdebase-workspace-bin

----------------------------------------

root@NX9420:/home/me# apt-get install kdebase-workspace-bin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
kdebase-workspace-bin is already the newest version.