Disabling Cpu Throttling

Hello Folks

      In some rare cases one needs to disable CPU throttling (e.g. see http://www.netlib.org/atlas/). However the latest processors from Intel (Sandybridge and newer) will cause suse to use the intel_pstate driver. This driver only has two governors, none of which allow the system to run at full speed without throttling.... It took me a few days to figure this one out... So to disable throttling you need to disable this driver. I just wanted to post a little note about this in case there is another head-scratching suse users out there...

How to run CPU’s at full speed:

  1. re-boot

  2. at the grub menu move cursor to the linux entry you want to boot into

  3. press ‘e’ to edit the boot settings

  4. find the line where it starts the kernel…

  5. add the following option “intel_pstate=disable”

  6. Press Ctrl+X to boot that modified entry

  7. Once in the system open a terminal

  8. su to gain root privileges

  9. run “cpupower -c 0-N frequency-set -g performance” (N is the processor number of the last core)

     Next time you reboot the original settings should be restored... 
    

Take Care
Mike

PS: This may seem like a trivial post… However I tried achieving the same effect with the OC settings in the BIOS… It turns out the MSI X99S SLI Plus MOBO has some bugs where non-default settings will lead to random **** being written to your system drive, corrupting it and rendering it unmountable… recovery mounts revealed a lot of corrupted data and meta-data… I had to reinstall opensuse 5 times before I figured out the source of the problems (I suspected btrfs, suspected poor system drive integrity, but testing ruled out those possibilities)… so if this post was on openSuse on Tuesday I would have saved a lot of headaches…