The Importance Of Thermald On Linux For Modern Intel Tiger Lake Laptops

[coder]

Absolutely. Controversy is my middle name

Did you guys even say which distro or kernel you're using?

But I'm not surprised to see a Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U beat a Intel Core i5-4670K.

[FPScholten]

On my trusty (old) Haswell laptop Thermald reduces overall performance by almost 5%, so I have it permanently disabled. It hardly makes any difference in energy consumption.

[perpetually high]

On my trusty (old) Haswell laptop Thermald reduces overall performance by almost 5%, so I have it permanently disabled. It hardly makes any difference in energy consumption.

Upvoted you for the trusty Haswell laptop, I might give that a shot too and disable thermald on my MBP

Curious, if you could run that ctx clock on your Haswell laptop and see what you get. Just want to see the range of the context clocks on Haswell chips

edit: looks like thermald wasn't even running on my 2010 MBP "Westmere"

$ sudo service thermald status
● thermald.service - Thermal Daemon Service
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/thermald.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
[B]Active: inactive (dead) since Mon 2021-07-19 13:39:03 PDT; 1min 11s ago[/B]
Process: 714 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/thermald --systemd --dbus-enable --adaptive (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 714 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Jul 19 13:39:01 mac systemd[1]: Starting Thermal Daemon Service...
Jul 19 13:39:03 mac systemd[1]: Started Thermal Daemon Service.
[B]Jul 19 13:39:03 mac thermald[714]: NO RAPL sysfs present
Jul 19 13:39:03 mac thermald[714]: 11 CPUID levels; family:model:stepping 0x6:25:5 (6:37:5)
Jul 19 13:39:03 mac thermald[714]: Need Linux PowerCap sysfs
Jul 19 13:39:03 mac thermald[714]: Unsupported cpu model or platform[/B]
Jul 19 13:39:03 mac systemd[1]: thermald.service: Succeeded

No thermald support. This MBP has an Intel "Westmere" chip. Intel i5 M 520 2c/4t @ 2.395GHz and boosts to 2.66 all 4t. Not bad

Luckily I use mbpfan for a cooling solution and that's been working very well for me. This laptop flies. You would never know it's 11 years old. And I have a CD-ROM driver/burner!! Mwhaha, suckers

edit 2: compiling the kernel on the MBP right now

Every 1.0s: sensors | head -n 4 mac: Mon Jul 19 14:39:21 2021

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0: +69.0°C (high = +95.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 2: +77.0°C (high = +95.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

Every 1.0s: cpufreq-info|grep "CPU frequency" mac: Mon Jul 19 14:40:35 2021

current CPU frequency is 2.66 GHz.
current CPU frequency is 2.66 GHz.
current CPU frequency is 2.66 GHz.
current CPU frequency is 2.66 GHz.

Not bad... Not bad a'tall

[Linuxxx]

On my trusty (old) Haswell laptop Thermald reduces overall performance by almost 5%, so I have it permanently disabled. It hardly makes any difference in energy consumption.

Guess what?!
Thermald makes even less sense on desktop-class Intel CPUs, yet it gets unanimously enabled by default on basically every major Linux distro out there...

[Linuxxx]

Have you done any benchmarks on this or is it just a seat of the pants feeling? I find this very suspicious because both performance governors will run the CPU at its maximum clock regardless of the load. I don't see where the difference would come from.

AFAIR it was from an advice written in a low-latency tuning guide for RHEL, where it said that disabling intel_pstate also disables the intel_idle driver, the real source & culprit for higher latency times.

[kcrudup]

FWIW, I've disabled thermald and instead use a program called "Throttled" ([email protected]:erpalma/throttled.git) instead. I use it to set Max TDP on AC to 40W and 28W on Battery along with max temp to 95C on my XPS 7390 2-in-1 and it works great.

[t.s.]

intel-undervolt (for intel system), everyone? I've undervolt my i3-7100u, CPU, CPU Cache & GPU by 100mv. Quite stable for now, and hope it's slash my power consumption and heat.

Edit: Tried it with 4800MQ with just ~50mv

[kcrudup]

Only thing that worries me about undervolting is the inability to tell when you cross the line from "saving power" to "instability".

[curfew]

Only thing that worries me about undervolting is the inability to tell when you cross the line from "saving power" to "instability".

I've been bitten by this in a nasty way a few times. Basically my system is very stable in my daily use, but for some reason installing system updates would often trigger a crash, causing system-wide corruption. Ability to recover is purely down to luck with at which point it crashed... I am now running safer undervolting to avoid this.

[curfew]

Just so you guys are aware, Thermald seems to have a configuration file for choosing the "cooling drivers" and the list also includes pstate and cpufreq. So if you're having problems with one or the other, there is a way to configure in Thermald as well, without having to resort to kernel arguments etc.