(SOLVED) CPU Scaling on 4770K

[Farfenkugell]

Hello,

 

I have been playing around with unraid (6.8.3) now for a while, but I am still unsure if I have set it correctly or missing something.

My home server is running: 4770k, 16GB ram, HDD x6 (all except one are spinned down most of the time), SSD for cache, USB boot. (It is pretty much old PC, not the best for power efficiancy)

Server runs: binhex-qbittorrentvpn, plex, resilo-sync. That is it, no VM, no other dockers.

I have installed Fix Common Problems (none) and Tips and Tweaks plugins.

 

In Tips and Tweaks plugins I have set CPU Scaling Governor to Power Save (I have only power save, performance and scheduled, no other).

Driver in use is Intel Pstate.

 

Now to the problem, it does not scale down while system is idle.

Bowser: Sun Mar 29 16:25:41 2020
Every 2.0s: grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo                                                    

cpu MHz         : 2300.501
cpu MHz         : 2676.811
cpu MHz         : 2223.091
cpu MHz         : 1856.778
cpu MHz         : 2221.020
cpu MHz         : 2075.670
cpu MHz         : 2433.324
cpu MHz         : 1833.564

Overall Load is 1% to 4% on idle (35 C temp), but the frequency does not seem to drop.

Shouldn't it go down to 800 Mhz (I believe that was what I could get on Windows).

 

Am I missing something? 

 

PS: I did limit cpu ratio in Bios to 2.7 to not blast at 3.5 or more.

 

 

Edited March 29, 2020 by Farfenkugell

[testdasi]

I think you need to turn on Intel Speedstep in the BIOS but it is disabled if you manually tune your CPU, including underclocking.

[Farfenkugell]

37 minutes ago, testdasi said:

I think you need to turn on Intel Speedstep in the BIOS but it is disabled if you manually tune your CPU, including underclocking.

It was set to Auto, put now it to Enabled.
Plus C3 State to Enabled from Auto.

Booted server, made sure there are no activity in htop or docker usage.

Still jumping between 1.1 up to 3.3Ghz.

 

Enabled other C states, disabled turbo boost, set core ratio to 2.7, it still is blasting up to 3.5Ghz, confused...

 

Edited March 29, 2020 by Farfenkugell

[Farfenkugell]

Disabling intel_pstate driver and fallbacking to acpi-cpufreq seems did the trick, on power saving mode it is now stuck at 800 Mhz.
Will need to play around more with other CPU Scaling Governors, but for my needs, it seems so far working.

 

You can disable the Intel-Pstate driver by editing /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg and adding a intel_pstate=disable:

...
label unRAID OS
  menu default
  kernel /bzimage
  append intel_pstate=disable initrd=/bzroot
...

With conservative or even on deman it works just fine now.

Edited March 29, 2020 by Farfenkugell