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Why does the powersave profile default to Ondemand instead of Powersave? #696

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FlameSniper opened this issue Oct 13, 2024 · 1 comment

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@FlameSniper
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I am beta testing Fedora 41 and i have been monitoring how tuneD works.

Both balanced and performance work as expected, but powersave confuses me.
I had it as the active power mode (what is activated in Fedora Workstation 41's power GUI) and i noticed it draining a ton of battery, more than balanced.

I did more digging with cpupower_gui to see the active kernel cpufreq governor policy and i found out that powersave defaults to using the Ondemand governor.

Why are the technical reasons behind this governor choice? Wouldn't it make more sense to use the Powersave governor?

My CPU is a Ryzen 5 3500U, in the weird case this is a bug and the information is needed. My laptop uses the cpufreq driver.
Related kernel documentation: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/governors.txt

@FlameSniper FlameSniper changed the title Why does the powersave governor default to Ondemand and not Powersave? Why does the powersave profile default to Ondemand instead of Powersave? Oct 13, 2024
@yump
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yump commented Jan 3, 2025

Because that choice was made 13 years ago, according to the git blame, and at that time schedutil was basically terrible if it even existed and wasn't still wandering in the wilderness of custom Android CPU governors. Furthermore this code has not, apparently, been used in anger across diverse hardware at any time in those 13 years. Otherwise it would be an utterly horrifying 2 dimensional lookup table of (cpu_vendor&generation, kernel version), and the output would write between 1 and 2 of like 5 different sysfs files.

In fairness, most of the blame for this can be laid on Intel and a bunch of Android device vendors.

Personally, back then I'd've chosen the conservative governor for a power saving profile, not ondemand.

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