This morning, I noticed the system temperature was oddly low, only just above 40°C. I didn’t mind at first, but then I felt it seemed to run slower than before, which might just from confusion after I checked the frequencies from /proc/cpuinfo.

I had not looked at file for years, and I saw the frequency was fixed at 1833MHz and 1000MHz, two cores, respectively. So, I tried the ultimate fix, turning it off and on again, didn’t work. I began to wonder if anything got updated recently, not the kernel nor any system/hardware stuff that I could remember.

At this point, I laughed before I knew there must be a setting wrong and for years, I had not realized that. So I went back to the power management in kernel configuration and found that I might have been using the wrong governor since 2012-08-27 as kernel 3.4 recommended ondemand governor according to ArchWiki.

That was 3.5 years ago.

Or it could be since 2011-05-18 with kernel 2.6.37, at the time, the userspace governor became the default over performance governor, and SpeedStep configurations were gone.

Nearly 5 years ago.

I knew the setting was correct at very beginning, had seen the frequencies bouncing in Conky, but since I started using my own dzen-status (2010-12-08), CPU frequency was never displayed. I rely on CPU utilization and the temperature to gauge, how hard CPU was working. I never thought about the frequency.

After it’s fixed, I could feel a boost in performance, fully 100% as needed, not only (1000+1833)/(2*1833)=77.28%. Also, the frequency is ranging from 1000 to 1833 MHz, not fixed, anymore.

CPU0 was working super hard at full speed while CPU1 was licensed to slack.