Intel i5-8350U only boosts to 3.0GHz but should boost to 3.6GHz

Issues & Assistance
1

I’m running CachyOs kernel 7.0.1-1 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T480 with Intel i5-8350U CPU. The CPU is capable of boosting up to 3.6GHz but I noticed that when I run a test app that occupies all cores at 100% boost is capped at 3.0GHz.

Here is the output from 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
energy performance preference: balance_performance
hardware limits: 400 MHz - 3.60 GHz
available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
current policy: frequency should be within 400 MHz and 3.60 GHz.
The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
current CPU frequency: 800 MHz (asserted by call to kernel)
boost state support:
Supported: yes
Active: yes

I’m running on AC power and the power profile is set to ‘Performance’. Even so, I noted that in the output above the energy performance preference setting isbalance_performance, so I tried:

❯ sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

That didn’t help, so I tried forcing boost with:

❯ sudo cpupower-set -t 1

No joy there either.

Note: Prior to installing CachyOS I was running PopOS! on the same machine and the CPU boosted to 3.6GHz when running the same test app.

As the whole point of moving to CachyOS was to reap the performance benefits I’m a little disappointed to find that the CPU performance is not what it should be! Any help would be greatly appreciated as apart from this issue I’m enjoying CachyOS.

2

The combination of balance_performance and governor "powersave" there indicates you are in Balanced mode.

You can verify and change it:

# check
powerprofilesctl list
# change
powerprofilesctl set performance

This is also accessible via the battery icon in systray.

3

Hi, this could also be a TDP limit problem, does your CPU still boost while stressing only a single core?

Edit: Seems like the archwiki has something probably related to your problem:

4

Thanks, but don’t see powerprofilesctl installed and it isn’t listed when I search for it in the CachyOS Package Installer… In any case, the Power Profile is already set to Performance in the battery systray icon.

5

Thanks, but I have the latest firmware updates installed and as I said, it was working fine in PoP OS! so I think it’s a CachyOS issue, not a generic Linux issue.

6

It’s provided by power-profiles-daemon package, which is an optional dependency of both cachyos-settings and powerdevil (plasma requirement). It is required for game-performance to work. I haven’t checked, but there’s a good chance it’s also required for the power profile widget to work. There might be errors in your logs, any time you try to change the profile.

It should have been installed by default on your system, unless you removed it, or installed Cachy in some non-standard way?

7

Oh, CachyOS is based on ArchLinux, that’s why I recommended the ArchWiki page. It basically recommends installing a daemon called throttled to fix a similar problem.

Said package is also on the CachyOS repositories, so you can just install it (throttled is the name of the package) and run
sudo systemctl enable --now throttled.service
to see if it fixes the problem.

8

Thanks for your help, that fixed the issue! :grinning_face: