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Being able to scale up or down the CPU speed for my laptop is great for when I need to conserve battery life or get better performance out of my laptop when I need it. This is a short guide on using cpupower to control CPU scaling on Arch Linux.

Prepare the system¶

• Make sure the system is up to date:
  

  sudo pacman -Syu
  

Install cpupower¶

• Install cpupower:
  

  sudo pacman -S cpupower
  

• Start and enable the cpupower service at boot:
  

  sudo systemctl enable cpupower.service
  sudo systemctl start cpupower.service
  

• Show the current CPU information:
  

  cpupower frequency-info
  

  • Example output:
    

    analyzing CPU 0:
      driver: powernow-k8
      CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1
      CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0 1
      maximum transition latency: 107 us.
      hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.00 GHz
      available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 800 MHz
      available cpufreq governors: userspace, ondemand, performance
      current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 2.00 GHz.
                      The governor "userspace" may decide which speed to use
                      within this range.
      current CPU frequency is 800 MHz.
      boost state support:
        Supported: no
        Active: no
    

• Change the CPU governor:
  

  sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance
  

• Speed up the CPU:
  

  sudo cpupower frequency-set -f 2.00 GHz
  

Resources¶

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling