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-   -   Installing Squeeze. CPU slow? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/installing-squeeze-cpu-slow-888032/)

mpyusko 06-26-2011 11:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid (Post 4396202)
Have you a kernel source? run make -j10 in the kernel and see if the cpu sweats. If it does, relax. You have 'enough' cpu.

I guess I should be a little more specific. When it slows to 600MHz, sometimes it's idle but other times it's not. The throttle should kick up when it gets busy, but in this case it's not. It's like there is a rogue script somewhere that as soon as the fan kicks on to cool the CPU down, all thresholds are fixed to 600 MHz Min /600 MHz Max and the whole system becomes nearly unusable. At one point it to me over 20 minutes to reload this page in Iceweasel running in KDE. I'm spent many hours Googling and rebooting but I can't seem to find the culprit. All I know is when the system boots, I get a line to the tune of "Loading cpufreqd...... failed." But if the system is cool it is throttling properly. Once the fan needs to kick on the system gets stuck at 600MHz and is never released without a reboot.

business_kid 06-27-2011 11:16 AM

NOW we have a clear definition of the problem. Cpufreqd sounds awfully like something that may be at the heart of a cpu frequency problem, so I would try installing Cpufreqd

Have you a heat problem? The cpu won't speed up unless it's adequately cooled.

mpyusko 06-27-2011 01:00 PM

I never had this problem with Lenny. As noted in the OP, it all started during the Install of squeeze.

cpufreqd only shows "failed" during the boot sequence. However, cpufreq-utils loads properly (as far as I can tell) and sets the system to ondemand. Immediately following boot (and not loading X) cpufreq-info shows proper configuration. "./etc/init.d/cpufreqd resart" also will load without an error. The error it encounters during boot is unknown since I can't seem to find it in any /var/log files.

I'm seriously about to beat my head against the wall. My laptop has been out of service for ~6mo because the screen died. I just spent $60 on a new backlight and invertor and installed them. I hope not for nothing.

business_kid 06-27-2011 01:32 PM

cpufreqd is not part of cpufreq-utils. I have slackware-13.37 here. I do suggest you read instead of freaking. There are several things with a finger on cpu frequency: The cpu being too hot; Battery low; governor saving power; and then all the clever little daemons, utilities and knacky bits. If you have kde, all this could be running in triplicate (kde always seems that slow).

mpyusko 06-27-2011 01:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid (Post 4397160)
cpufreqd is not part of cpufreq-utils. I have slackware-13.37 here. I do suggest you read instead of freaking.

Correct. And I also have Slackware 13.37 running on my destop (listed in my signature) but Squeeze and Slackware configure, display, and log things very differently. I have cpufreqd installed and cpufreq-utils. They are both loaded by 2 init.d scripts (actually cpufreqd is loaded by 2, making 3 but...). I'm starting to think this is a BIOS issue. Because I finally managed to figure out how to get GRUB2 to boot my XP partition again (though I have to create a "menuentry...." at each boot to do it) and it's happening there too, but XP has always been a pain on it.

I've re-flashed the BIOS like 6 times. Not sure what else to try. Is it possible that the MB's hardware monitor is faulty and locking out the OS's?

I like Slackware for my Desktop because it's rock-solid, stable and versatile. I put Debian on my laptops because in a mobile environment the Apt repository is priceless. With Slackware i can compile and configure anything to run on it. But in a mobile environment, ease and a speedy install win out.

I installed Debian with the multi-arch disc and added KDE after. I think I'm going to use the i386-KDE disc and see how that runs. I also have a USB hard drive running Lenny I can pop in and double-check with.

widget 06-27-2011 02:20 PM

I know nothing about the cpu problem but as for grub you need t oput that menu entry you create in /etc/grub/grub.d.40_custom and run, as root;
Code:

update-grub
This will put the menu entry on your grub.cfg file and have it at the end of your screen menu. If you want it first, rename the file to "06_custom" before running update-grub.

mpyusko 06-27-2011 02:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by widget (Post 4397223)
I know nothing about the cpu problem but as for grub you need t oput that menu entry you create in /etc/grub/grub.d.40_custom and run, as root;
Code:

update-grub
This will put the menu entry on your grub.cfg file and have it at the end of your screen menu. If you want it first, rename the file to "06_custom" before running update-grub.

Doh! And like a fool I've been wondering why grub-update wasn't found. LOL!
It would be nice if 'man grub' actually returned a result.

widget 06-27-2011 04:06 PM

Yes it would. It should actually be "man grub-pc" but that doesn't get you anything either. The best documentation on grub is now at;
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275
and;
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...20the%20LiveCD

The perpetrator of the first is guilty of most of the second. He was one of us in Ubuntu 9.10 testing when grub-pc was dropped on us at A2 time with NO documentation worth a damn that we could find.

Spent 2 weeks editing the grub.cfg file before we started to find hints here and there. Drs305 put all our discoveries, along with a vast amount of experimentation on his part, into the thread over there. He keeps it up to date very well.

There are a lot of links at the bottom of that first entry that are just great.

One thing that is good to run when you make a change in anything to do with grub, after you run update-grub, is "grub-mkconfig". This will, in terminal, print out the grub.cfg file so you can check it and make any corrections right then by editing the right script and then running update-grub again followed by grub-mkconfig again to check it.

Custom menu entries are very handy and, I believe, what you are intended to use after the first boot to your installation. Using them you can disable all other scripts in grub.d above 05 except for your ??_custom file. This makes the load time of the grub menu a lot quicker as there is so much less grub.cfg file to read.

This is the entry for the OS I am on right now. It will load any Debian based OS that is on this partition. I could install a version of Mint or Ubuntu here tomorrow and use the same entry unedited, as it just calls for the partition and boots the newest kernel there.
Code:

echo "Adding Squeezy on sda7" >&2
cat << EOF
menuentry "Squeezy on sda7" {
    set root=(hd0,7)
        linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda7 ro quiet splash
        initrd /initrd.img
}
EOF

You can put any nonsense in between the "" that you want. The first is what you see when you run update-grub and the second what you see on your screen menu.

I actually have this in the instruction string so that bootchart works on boot up, it comes after a space past "splash";
Code:

initcall_debug printk.time=y quiet init=/sbin/bootchartd ... rdinitrd=/sbin/bootchartd
When editing your grub menu entries make sure that text wrapping is NOT enabled.

mpyusko 06-27-2011 09:28 PM

I booted up Lenny off the USB hard drive and it face a similar issue, but felt different. i.e. The CPU dropped to 600, locked 600/600MHz (min max) with the fan on, but stayed around 11% CPU. It got up to 55% doing a couple tasks, and even 100% for a couple seconds but remained snappy and responsive. On the other hand, with Squeeze, it would drop to 600 lock 600/600 and remain @100% cpu and would be practically unusable. Remember how in the OP I said the istall was running @600MHz? well I'm running the debian-6.0.1a-i386-kde-CD-1.iso install CD right now and it's zipping along at 1.8GHz and yes the fan is running, and the fan has even been changing speeds. 'lsmod |grep cpu' returns zero results but fan, thermal, and therrmal_sys are running. cpufreq is not running.

mpyusko 09-15-2011 09:47 PM

Solved???
 
Update....

The laptop was running for a while and then I shelved it because it is practically unusable at 600MHz. It inadvertently got unplugged and the batteries died. I just pulled it off the shelf and booted it up to get some files off it and it was still experiencing the same issue. I dove into it with a fresh mind and started reading the /etc/init.d files and a whole slew of others (gotta love Linux and the programmers/developers who put so many comments in their code and files.) I tracked it down to the /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils file. Namely the top where the default lines are
Code:

MAX_SPEED="0"
MIN_SPEED="0"

This wasn't working and after changing them to:
Code:

MAX_SPEED="1800000"
MIN_SPEED="600000"

Everything seems to be running fine. It's been running for over 32 hours and properly scaling anyway. Now I can actually use it, Woo-hoo! This is actually pretty important to me since I had just upgraded the HD from 60GB - 80GB, the RAM from 512MB to 2GB, replaced the primary battery, the LCD back-light and inverter, and I have a pair of hinges waiting to go in it. (All that cost less than a netbook and it blows away any Atom.)

TobiSGD 09-15-2011 10:51 PM

Thanks for posting back your solution. Please mark the thread as solved using the thread tools at the top of the thread.


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