Hi Tim,

here  is what I found in my experience:

> 1. Employ a tickless kernel, probably a kernel close to 2.6.24.

This has very little effect, because C-states have little effect on this
processor.

> 2. Turn on the ondemand governor (set
> /sys/devices/system/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor to
> ondemand).
> 
> 3. Trun on the menu idle governor (set
> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle_governor_ro to menu)

This was both activated automatically on my Fedora/Rawhide system.

> 4. Turning on the power aware scheduler  (set
> /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings to 1)

No big effect observed so far. This may be due to the fact that we need
to bind our Benchmark JVMs to CPUs (each JVM is bound to 2 cores sharing
a cache). If we don't, we loose about 3% max throughput which ruins the
benchmark result (no way to compensate that by saving power on lower loads).

> 5. Use a larger sampling (like 1000000) versus the default value of 2000
> in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_rate.  For
> SPECpower workload, the load level is very steady, so it does not pay to
> shift gear to a high cpu frequency too quickly.

This was the key for better savings in the intermediate load range. I
don't have the numbers here right now, but it's around 10W at loadlevels
20%-60%. Thanks a lot! It even helped the benchmark result by improving
the maximum throughput by ~1%, which is very important for the final
benchmark result. I got the same benchmark result as under Windows now,
despite a slightly lower max throughput.

Martin

-- 
Martin Wilck
PRIMERGY System Software Engineer
FSC IP ESP DE6

Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH
Heinz-Nixdorf-Ring 1
33106 Paderborn
Germany

Tel:                    ++49 5251 8 15113
Fax:                    ++49 5251 8 20209
Email:                  mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Internet:               http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com
Company Details:        http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/imprint.html

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