So after many hours of following the manual to a T, and struggling to understand why my real time kernel settings were being overwritten on reboot - I find out a Power and Battery KDE widget is enslaving CPU governor via a 2nd Power Profile.
The Power Profile setting on the widget pane, is not also on the main settings page. The page it takes you to when you navigate using the button it intends you to use, leads you to that page, which it isn’t on.
Does anyone else find a DE battery widget having a control that governs a CPU governor, intended for laptops, just logjammed into the Plasma install, at all appropriate? I mean WTF? I have a stock 3080 card, and about 10 other parts that would signify to any software by nature of existing that I am on a large tower. Any advice on how to handle amateur hour KDE, or should I move to something like Mate? I’m honestly blown away that the terminal is made to be the ineffective method here thanks to extremely poor decision making by KDE.
Does anyone know how I can safely set governor profile for intel to performance? I see uninstalling ppd was the thing, but I didn’t have p-p-d on my machine - maybe it goes by a diff name that is KDE prefixed. Very fun stuff
I ended up solving it. It was indeed the power management in KDE. I didn’t dig too deep into it after I solved it, but the power daemon causes many sane conditions for intel CPUs to fail in the way they were intended to be interacted with. I deleted the power daemon, while leaving Powerdevil in tact, and it allows the governor to remain persistent. If you don’t - you are set to “balanced”, ironically I think it just sets you to Powersave unless they recently fixed. It modifies your p state range. Let’s now assume it was coded to either Powersave or Performance. I bricked my machine 4 times following the literal Arch docs twice and Cachy twice, before realizing it was indeed just a widget making my computer act differently.
I want to make that super clear one more time so the correct feedback can be taken from this post to whoever sees it.
A fundamental power management setting, which was not present in the in depth system settings menu, and had CPU governing implications on my machine, was hidden in a Power and Battery widget. Cpupower was working as intended and being superseded. Hilariously, adding the suggested swappiness config retroactively out of curiosity completely ignores vm.swappiness because you have to set in in 2 places, and then disable a daemon based power management connected or maybe not connected to a battery I don’t have. How does one spend so much time developing a complex daemon that circumvents system behavior but not any time on a simple hardware check that governs half their design decisions? Since I ditched KDE, Cachy has been by and large the BEST distro I’ve used.