The performance governor is the right choice for servers, but it's not the right choice on non-server platforms, it's also not the default kernel setting, it was set because we have the ondemand.service in userspace that can change it back to ondemand (or well we have the service because of that change in the kernel :D).
Fans do not necessarily spin, and you might not actually notice any significant changes in power usage, but the expectation of a desktop user is that the CPU scales its frequencies down, which recent-ish Intel CPUs (Skylake+) on like a ThinkPad T480s - which manage the pstates in hardware instead of software like the old MacBook does - don't do. If we compare this to Red Hat, what they do is CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y in RHEL and CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_ONDEMAND=y in fedora. Power usage, at 3-6% CPU usage: Powersave: I see 0.9-1.4W power usage on the cores Performance, I see 1.6-2.5W -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to systemd in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1885730 Title: Bring back ondemand.service or switch kernel default governor for pstate - pstate now defaults to performance governor Status in linux package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in systemd package in Ubuntu: Invalid Status in linux source package in Groovy: Confirmed Status in systemd source package in Groovy: Invalid Bug description: In a recent merge from Debian we lost ondemand.service, meaning all CPUs now run in Turbo all the time when idle, which is clearly suboptimal. The discussion in bug 1806012 seems misleading, focusing on p-state vs other drivers, when in fact, the script actually set the default governor for the pstate driver on platforms that use pstate. Everything below only looks at systems that use pstate. pstate has two governors: performance and powerstate. performance runs CPU at maximum frequency constantly, and powersave can be configured using various energy profiles energy profiles: - performance - balanced performance - balanced power - power It defaults to balanced performance, I think, but I'm not sure. Whether performance governor is faster than powersave governor is not even clear. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux50-pstate- cpufreq&num=5 benchmarked them, but did not benchmark the individual energy profiles. For a desktop/laptop, the expected behavior is the powersave governor with balanced_performance on AC and balanced_power on battery. I don't know about servers or VMs, but the benchmark series seems to indicate it does not really matter much performance wise. I think most other distributions configure their kernels to use the powersave governor by default, whereas we configure it to use the performance governor and then switch it later in the boot to get the maximum performance during bootup. It's not clear to me that's actually useful. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1885730/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
