Intel Skylake Performing Better With CPUFreq Than P-State For Linux Gaming

[Michael]

Perhaps a bit off topic but what really makes articles on phoronix featured. Is it just the author (in this case Michael) who decides this?! I would assume the number of viewers who clicked on the article would eventually give it it's featured icon. I have seen articles marked as featured apparently seconds after they have been posted. I am aware that featured means prominent stuff and something that "stands out". Don't get me wrong - I appreciate the articles, but on the other hand I would not want something marked featured based on just one persons view.

Featured is always for the long, multi-page articles to differentiate it from the quick news posts.

[thefirstm]

Basically p-state is outdated for Skylake, Windows 10 would use Speed Shift. No idea how to use that with Linux.

After reading about "Speed Shift", I am 99.9% sure that it is just a marketing name for HWP (Hardware P-States). intel_pstate already supports it, and in fact supported it before Windows 10 was a thing.

[smitty3268]

I'm guessing "Featured" is when the information comes from Phoronix/Michael, and is not a repost of something he read somewhere else.

Yeah, I think it's just related to how much time Michael spends on them. Copying a news release from somewhere is fast, so it's non-featured. Most things where he runs benchmarks takes him time to do that, so he marks it as featured.

[Kano]

Basically p-state is outdated for Skylake, Windows 10 would use Speed Shift. No idea how to use that with Linux.

[geearf]

I'm guessing "Featured" is when the information comes from Phoronix/Michael, and is not a repost of something he read somewhere else.

[waxhead]

Perhaps a bit off topic but what really makes articles on phoronix featured. Is it just the author (in this case Michael) who decides this?! I would assume the number of viewers who clicked on the article would eventually give it it's featured icon. I have seen articles marked as featured apparently seconds after they have been posted. I am aware that featured means prominent stuff and something that "stands out". Don't get me wrong - I appreciate the articles, but on the other hand I would not want something marked featured based on just one persons view.

[thefirstm]

By default, intel_pstate's HWP mode is disabled with Ubuntu Wily on skylake due to instability with certain systems. It would be interesting to see what the results are if you pass "intel_pstate=skylake_hwp" as a kernel boot arg to override that.

EDIT: Now that I read the article again, I can see he is using an apparently-upstream kernel that probably doesn't have the HWP-disabling patch in it. Nevermind.

[carewolf]

there is something wrong with the benchmarks, there is no difference between powersave and performance, even for cpu intensive benchmarks. the cpufreq setting is not working

Well, "ondemand" should give the same performance as "performance" (but then so should P-state), "powersave" could give the same performance but usually won't. Yes, it looks a bit odd.

[Michael]

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documenta.../governors.txt clearly states that "The CPUfreq governor "powersave" sets the CPU statically to the lowest frequency within the borders of scaling_min_freq and scaling_max_freq."

Find the problem and fix it!

Good luck.

Yep, glad to with enough subscripbers/support.

[philips]

there is something wrong with the benchmarks, there is no difference between powersave and performance, even for cpu intensive benchmarks. the cpufreq setting is not working

Indeed weird, but the Phoronix suite is working alright, here's what I've got with two tests: