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After installing Fedora 33 (also tried kubuntu and ubuntu 20.04) on my laptop, I have the problem that after some time, the CPU randomly gets stuck at low frequency (400MHz-800Mhz) and doesn't step up resulting in very slow response times.

cpupower command doesn't change the CPUs speed even it returns status code 0.

I have tried disabling intel_pstate and thermald.

Some system info:

$ uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 5.10.7-200.fc33.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jan 12 20:20:11 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux 
$ cat /etc/*release 
Fedora release 33 (Thirty Three)
$ grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10510U CPU @ 1.80GHz
$ grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo
cpu MHz         : 800.004
cpu MHz         : 800.002
cpu MHz         : 800.001
cpu MHz         : 800.002
cpu MHz         : 800.005 
cpu MHz         : 800.001 
cpu MHz         : 800.000 
cpu MHz         : 800.002

$ cpupower frequency-info
 analyzing CPU 0:
driver: intel_pstate
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency:  Cannot determine or is not supported.
hardware limits: 400 MHz - 4.90 GHz
available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
current policy: frequency should be within 400 MHz and 4.90 GHz.
               The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
               within this range.
current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
current CPU frequency: 500 MHz (asserted by call to kernel)
boost state support:
 Supported: yes
 Active: yes
Juan Cruz
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  • First ting I'd try is to update to the the [Fedora Rawhide testing kernel](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RawhideKernelNodebug) to see if the problem still occurs. (Currently, that's 5.11 rc4) If it does, please file a bug. – mattdm Jan 26 '21 at 16:30
  • @mattdm Seems to be working a bit better, I need to continue testing it. Anyway, docker stopped working after installing this kernel so I cannot use it much... – Juan Cruz Jan 28 '21 at 14:07
  • That's odd. I'll pass that on to people. Does podman (a drop-in docker replacement for many use cases) still work? – mattdm Jan 28 '21 at 22:15
  • Yes it does. For your reference the error I get is: docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:370: starting container process caused: process_linux.go:459: container init caused: process_linux.go:422: setting cgroup config f or procHooks process caused: can't load program: invalid argument: in-kernel BTF is malformed processed 0 insns (limit 1000000) max_states_per_insn 0 total_states 0 peak_states 0 mark_read 0: unknown. ERRO[0000] error waiting for container: context canceled – Juan Cruz Jan 29 '21 at 11:53
  • @mattdm I tested a bit more and the problem happens in the new kernel too. – Juan Cruz Feb 02 '21 at 15:59
  • Yeah, please file a bug. You may also want the cpu frequency problem at Lenovo's official forum for Fedora: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Fedora/bd-p/lx04_en – mattdm Feb 02 '21 at 21:38
  • Same problem here. But I need to provide some other insights: With Fedora 32 this problem seems to do not happen, I prefer to use Ubuntu 20.04, I'm stick with Ubuntu and their LTS versions. Also it is happening with Fedora 33, totally disappoint cuz this – Rober Diaz Mar 22 '21 at 14:55
  • @RoberDíaz Please check the answer. Hope it helps, and it would be great if you let me know if it works for you too. – Juan Cruz Apr 07 '21 at 00:17
  • @mattdm it would be great to have something similar to that in new fedora kernerls. – Juan Cruz Apr 07 '21 at 00:18

1 Answers1

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Seems https://github.com/erpalma/throttled tools fixes the issue. (I have tested it several days in fedora 32 and a few hours in Ubuntu 20).

Juan Cruz
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  • Seems this works on fedora 32 but not in ubuntu 20 – Juan Cruz Apr 14 '21 at 18:54
  • Not sure if this info is appreciacted, but I have a very similar problem running Windows on my work laptop; T14 Gen 1, updated BIOS, tried everything. Even with 8 threads of busy loop... the CPU sometimes goes into 400-500mhz, even though there is no thermal throttling. I suspect the problem lies with Lenovo's firmware, and due to the sporadic nature of the problem, I doubt whether the above actually works with fedora32 for a longer period of time. – Joeppie Apr 20 '21 at 13:03
  • It helped me on Ubuntu 20.10 too. after disabling secure-boot too (throttled wants to modify some processor/bios data) – razor May 03 '21 at 10:34