Is it bad to have the CPU governor disabled?
I'm using a Ryzen CPU that I overclocked. This disables AMD Cool n Quiet which in turn disables pstates (I guess) and thus there's no CPU governor. I tried reenabling Cool n Quiet along with the OC, but this causes heavy stutter in games.
I guess it's not harmful since I'm running this OC for a year now (and even longer in Windows (but no idea how this stuff is handled there) prior to switching this Desktop to Linux, too) and nothing happened.
The CPU still changes frequencies and clocks up and down depending on the load, so I guess the CPU itself takes over? Though I'm still curious whether it's a bad idea to not have a governor running?
Posted Jan 8, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC
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Usually there are, try "cpupower frequency-info" to see which ones are available/which one is active; "cpupower frequency-set --governor [governor_name]" lets you choose between them (might have to install cpupower).
There probably is, but not the one you can see with cpupower:
and cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors gives no such file or directory
I got nothing :( What distro?
P.S. what does does
show?
P.P.S. works on every box I tried
I'm using Arch. It should be the case with any other distro, too.
I found some other threads of people having the same issue. Apparently disabled Cool n Quiet it disables all the p and c states. But I can't find any information if this is in any way bad, but I kinda doubt it.
Your command didn't work but I used
and it shows the CPU freq going up and down just fine or staying at the maximum when I'm compiling something for example.
Re: Your P.P.S: Yeah it does work for me, too. But that's when I enable Cool n Quiet (The AMD Speed Step equivalent). Although this with the OC makes game stutter like crazy.
At least with Intel, cores could still "turbo" (go above base clock).
On which governor? All but "performance makes e.g. DAWs spew xruns while the cores are barely ticking over. "performance" governor doesn't lock the cores at max BTW, they still bounce in a range. What's the lowest clock you're getting?
You're on your own.