[powerd] mode adaptive2

[Kevin Oberman]

Bruno,

I have posted most of this in the past, but I'll repeat it as you are
talking about some of the same things.

We need a mechanism (powercontrol?) to talk to the powerd as it is
running. Among the things it should be able to do is to set a pseudo min
and max speed. for the system. This would put absolute limits on how
fast/slow powerd would ever set the speed. The ability to change this is
important as you would likely want this to be different for battery and
AC operation, especially at the high end. I want the Gnome CPU Frequency
applet to be able to set these. (I assume that KDE has/will have
something similar.)

I also want to eliminate poor choices for frequency. As I have noted, on
my T30 with a P4m CPU offering ICH Speedstep and TCC I only get useful
power reductions when using the lower CPU speed when the frequency
selected is below the lower available Speedstep setting. (I only have
two, 1.8 and 1.2 GHz.) I also have a problem in that when TCC and
Speedstep can provide the same pseudo-frequency at either Speedstep
setting, the faster CPU setting is chosen. This "costs" me two
settings. If I ever get a few minutes I'll look at adjusting the source
to fix this, but I've just been too busy and will likely continue to be
for a while. (I think you had previously commented on this problem.)

I also need to do more actual testing of CPU performance vs. power
consumption. I have tested under high CPU load, but not at idle and I
really need to do that, too.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634