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pop-os / system76-power

Power profile management for Linux
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Changing the power profile has no effect on CPU frequency bounds or screen brightness #300

Open b-Tomas opened 2 years ago

b-Tomas commented 2 years ago

Distribution: Pop!_OS 21.04 Kernel: 5.15.5-76051505-generic

Hardware: Host: HP Laptop 15-dw3xxx CPU: 11th Gen Intel i5-1135G7 (8) @ 4.200GHz GPU: Intel TigerLake GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics]

I remember the same thing happening on a 10th Gen Intel i5-1035G1 Lenovo Ideapad 3 laptop with Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS

Related Application and/or Package Version: system76-power: Installed: 1.1.20\~1637635456\~21.04~b5ed171

Issue/Bug Description: Changing the power mode won't alter the cpu frequency cap or the screen brightness. I realized that a few hours ago while reading about the expected behaviour (reduced screen brightness and cpu frequency for lower power modes) and I realized I had never seen any change in brightness variation or noticeable performance drop when using battery life mode since I started using Pop!_OS about a year ago (in 2 different laptops and 3 installs in total).

system76-power profile output for different power modes:

Power Profile: Performance
CPU: 9% - 100%, Turbo
Backlight intel_backlight: 33312/96000 = 34%

Power Profile: Balanced
CPU: 9% - 100%, Turbo
Backlight intel_backlight: 33312/96000 = 34%

Power Profile: Battery
CPU: 9% - 100%, Turbo
Backlight intel_backlight: 33312/96000 = 34%

Neither powertop or tlp are installed, so I don't see a reason for this to be the current configuration. I could't find any configuration file that I can tune to correct it.

Steps to reproduce: Run system76-power profile in the three different profiles and compare the output

Expected behavior: Lower maximum frequency, no turbo enabled and lower built in screen brightness on battery mode, and higher lower bound for CPU frequency on performance mode.

b-Tomas commented 2 years ago

I just updated to Pop!_OS 20.10 and I still get the same behaviour

b-Tomas commented 2 years ago

I found the file src/daemon/profiles.rs in this repository which seems to be responsible of the pstate settings. I have no reason to believe that the file might have been modified at some point of the instalation, but just to be sure, where is it supposed to be located on my drive? It probably won't be of any help if I find it but I'm just curious to know where these files are located. I don't think the frequency controller module (if such thing exists) is broken because I just installed this extension and works fine. I can disable turbo boost and change the minimum and maximum values for the CPU frequency and it does its job. I don't know if that helps, maybe these two extensions are using different drivers?

EDIT: In my newly installed extension there is an option to select the frequency scaling driver. It is currently set to _Automatic (intelpstate), with the other options being _intelpstate and cpufreq, the last one greyed out, I guess because it is not available. Does system76-power use cpufreq?