How to turn off Frequency Scaling ?

[Zergei72]

Hi ...

I just decided to give Linux another try ...

I'm sure this has been covered countless times before,
but ... I get this, when I install Mixbus / Ardour on Ubuntu Studio 16.04 ;

"System failed the quick sanity check... Looking for the cause

!!! WARNING !!! - Your system seems to use frequency scaling.
This can have a serious impact on audio latency.
For best results turn it off, e.g. by choosing the 'performance' governor."

SO ... What's the easiest workaround for this ?

- Zergei W -

[darrel_jw]

Hello Zergei

You didn't say what flavor of Linux, but this will work on any Ubuntu or Debian install:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/523640/ho...erformance

Hope this helps you!

Darrel

Hi ...

I just decided to give Linux another try ...

I'm sure this has been covered countless times before,
but ... I get this, when I install Mixbus / Ardour on Ubuntu Studio 16.04 ;

"System failed the quick sanity check... Looking for the cause

!!! WARNING !!! - Your system seems to use frequency scaling.
This can have a serious impact on audio latency.
For best results turn it off, e.g. by choosing the 'performance' governor."

SO ... What's the easiest workaround for this ?

- Zergei W -

[x42]

Most Desktops have an optional toolbar widget for this. in my case (mate desktop, debian) right click, right click on the toolbar > add to panel > Frequency Scaling Monitor.

Looks like:    

Then again it may not be an issue in the first place, modern CPUs switch frequencies fast enough (micro-seconds) and most Linux systems are configured to jump to the max when needed.

It's just a warning. But if you get dropouts (x-runs), power-safe modes are first thing to check!

Sometimes systems can't leave power-safe mode quickly enough or in some other cases: Most of the system may be idle (5-6 CPU cores do nothing) so the system enters power-safe mode, and the other 1-2 CPU cores which are actually busy doing DSP will also be taken into low-frequency as side-effect.

[calimerox]

if you have installed cpupower , run

sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

[BigstevE]

Hi Zergei,

If, for whatever reason, the above advice doesn't seem to help then you may need to consider what kind of CPU you have in your computer and what kernel mode governor you use for frequency scaling. Hopefully, you won't have to. If cpupower or desktop widgets work for you then, by all means, use it.

I'm not familiar with Ubuntu, nor AMD processors, but my experience with frequency scaling became somewhat more tedious to manage when I switched over to a computer with one of the later intel core series processors. Seems that intel's native p-states Linux driver (default for Sandy Bridge and later) manages this on it's own and doesn't respond to frequency setting commands. To get it to work I had to compile a kernel that specifically used the ACPI Processor P-states driver and not the Intel P state control. Only then could I properly bypass frequency scaling on my computer. I use the command line program cpufreq-set to set the minimum and maximum frequency the same, for every CPU on my computer. Many modern CPU's have a feature called hyperthreading which means a 'virtual' CPU for every physical one, to put simply. So for my quad-core computer I run the cpufreq-set command eight times to disable frequency scaling. For example on the command prompt I type:

cpufreq-set -d 2.4GHz -u 2.4GHz -c 0
all the way to
cpufreq-set -d 2.4GHz -u 2.4GHz -c 7
(the number after the -c are the number's of the CPU which have to be chosen to have their frequency coordinated by software.)

I would then verify this with the following command:
cpufreq-info | grep -e should -e current

It's not the easiest workaround around. But it works for me. So maybe the information I provided helps you or someone else figure out the method of disabling frequency scaling that works for them.

Best,

Steven.

[Plumocelot]

Hi Zergei,

If, for whatever reason, the above advice doesn't seem to help then you may need to consider what kind of CPU you have in your computer and what kernel mode governor you use for frequency scaling. Hopefully, you won't have to. If cpupower or desktop widgets work for you then, by all means, use it.

I'm not familiar with Ubuntu, nor AMD processors, but my experience with frequency scaling became somewhat more tedious to manage when I switched over to a computer with one of the later intel core series processors. Seems that intel's native p-states Linux driver (default for Sandy Bridge and later) manages this on it's own and doesn't respond to frequency setting commands. To get it to work I had to compile a kernel that specifically used the ACPI Processor P-states driver and not the Intel P state control. Only then could I properly bypass frequency scaling on my computer. I use the command line program cpufreq-set to set the minimum and maximum frequency the same, for every CPU on my computer. Many modern CPU's have a feature called hyperthreading which means a 'virtual' CPU for every physical one, to put simply. So for my quad-core computer I run the cpufreq-set command eight times to disable frequency scaling. For example on the command prompt I type:

cpufreq-set -d 2.4GHz -u 2.4GHz -c 0
all the way to
cpufreq-set -d 2.4GHz -u 2.4GHz -c 7
(the number after the -c are the number's of the CPU which have to be chosen to have their frequency coordinated by software.)

I would then verify this with the following command:
cpufreq-info | grep -e should -e current

It's not the easiest workaround around. But it works for me. So maybe the information I provided helps you or someone else figure out the method of disabling frequency scaling that works for them.

Best,

Steven.

Using a flavour of Ubuntu here and I found 'sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq' helped considerably as this allowed me to use the CPU frequency applet in Cadence. I think I probably fiddled with a few other things to get it to stay in performance mode. If you are still stuck I'll look through what I did exactly but try the above first.

It's worth persevering as I noticed a slightly better performance on my four core laptop. Also check your mixbus settings to ensure you are using 'all available processors' or 'all bar one'.

plum