Bug 119385

My system is a 3.6GHz Pentium 4.  I installed 10.0 RC1 and am using the 
default kernel.  Everything was very slow; there's a few comments here from me 
about this.  I finally figured out that my CPU was running at 450 MHz most of 
the time, which explains why it seemed like it was about as fast as my old 
Celeron 300 MHz. 
 
Upon more investigation, I found that my powersave daemon was set to use the 
"dynamic" CPU frequency policy (accessible through the KDE Kpowersave applet 
in the toolbar).  Messing with it some more, and looking at the output of the 
"cpufreq-info" while putting a load on the system, I found that the CPU 
frequency did indeed seem to be jumping around as the load varied, even up to 
3.6 GHz, but only for very short bursts, and then back down to 450 MHz. 
 
The overall effect seems to be very little visible performance improvement 
over the "powersave" policy, which just holds it at 450 MHz.  Everything is 
dog slow.  To me, this makes the "dynamic" policy utterly useless. 
 
I'd like to use dynamic frequency scaling, assuming it actually does save 
power (why else would it be there?), because there's many times I'm not doing 
much on the computer, or leave it on overnight, etc., but this level of 
performance is totally unacceptable. 
 
It seems to me the powersave daemon should have far more delay in changing the 
frequency: when a load reduction is detected, the frequency should be set to 
maximum and left there while the user is doing things.  After the load drops 
to near 0% for 10 seconds or so, it can then start scaling down.  The user 
shouldn't see much if any performance degradation compared to the full-speed 
mode.