No CPU scaling (cpufreq) support

[cal-lito]

I'm trying to enable CPU frequency scaling support on my M3A ASUS
Motherboard with a Phenom 9850 running Ubuntu 8.04 with all upadtes
applied.

When I install the applet, it tells me that my system does not
support frequency scaling; it then installs, and shows a CPU
always running at 2.5GHz.

Through the command-line, the command cpufreq-selector responds
with a "Frequency scaling not supported"; I indeed see nothing
related on /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-3]

The BIOS reports that the CPU *does* support frequency scaling,
yet it does not work.

Any ideas? Any additional packages that I need to install?
Play with the BIOS settings? (I did already, but I see nothing
that seems like a missing setting...)

Thanks for any tips!

Cal-lito
--

[Twintop]

Hi cal-lito,

There is not a K10 module available right now, but, the K8 module works in a limited capacity, letting a Phenom run at either 50% or 100%. Check out this post for some instructions: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=679509&p=4721464

[cal-lito]

Thanks Twintop for the info!

However, it's still not working!

I already had powernowd installed; when I try to run
modprobe powernow-k8, I get the error:

FATAL: Error inserting powernow_k8 (/lib/modules/ ... /powenow-k8.ko):
No such device


Not sure what device it is talking about. (would I need to
mknode something?)

On /var/log/messages, no error is reported (there's the line
reporting that powernow-k8 found 1 AMD Phenom with 4 CPU cores).

Any ideas about what may be missing or misconfigured?

Thanks,

Cal-lito
--

[Twintop]

Do you have Cool'N'Quiet enabled or disabled in the BIOS? Also, are you overclocking at all? IIRC, if C'n'Q is disabled and/or you're overlocking (which means C'n'Q has to be disabled), you can't do scaling.

[cal-lito]

Wait! Is it possible that the Cool'n'Quiet option has to be
enabled *at installation time*???

I ask because it was disabled by default, and then, while
attempting to make it work, I enabled that option (I didn't
know for sure, but it sounded like it might be necessary, so
I tried enabling it --- but it still didn't work).

I also enabled the ACPI 2.0 functions (also disabled by
default) --- also without effect.

I'm wondering now if it may be that the installer configures
all those entries appearing under /sys/devices/ ... based
on what it finds at that time? If so (not sure if this
even makes sense), is there a way around it other than
reinstalling? (I'm guessing there should be ... )

Thanks,

Cal-lito
--

[cal-lito]

Never mind --- my silly mistake, apparently!

It's working now; I had disabled the Cool'n'Quiet for some
reason; I had enabled it and it didn't work, but it was
because I didn't have the other stuff (the commands you
pointed me to); by the time I did execute those, the C'n'Q
was back to disabled...

Anyway, it looks pretty neat now (two-step limitation
notwithstanding); in fact, I encourage anyone running a
Phenom (or any Quad-Core, for that matter) to place four of
those little applets on the panel, and configure them to
monitor one CPU core each --- veeeeeeery neat! :-)

Thanks again for your patience and your help!

Cal-lito
--

[Twintop]

I have a startup script I threw together to enable the k8 powernow stuff. I can post it when I get home if you want? It is really, really simple.