ondemand governor zeropi

[TWM]

Armbianmonitor:

http://ix.io/2iO5

I run Armbian 20.02.1 stable on a zeropi which is used as a wireguard server and spotify direct client (USB to external DAC). Things run very well. Many thanks to everyone involved in keeping Armbian such a great distro! 

 

I noticed that when I turn on the ondemand governor the system becomes very unresponsive and music playback is stuttering. When I use the performance governor (even with min and max frequency both set to 480MHz) things run just fine. Most of the time 480MHz will be sufficient, but it would be nice to be able to take advantage of the ondemand governor. 

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[guidol]

1 hour ago, TWM said:

Any help is greatly appreciated.

did you try conservative as governor? on  some systems this did work better as ondemand and with less mhz than  ondemand.

[yoq]

On the H2 (the same is true for most modern ARM chips) there is almost no benefit to lowering the clock rate by itself if the CPU has idle periods. 
If the CPU is IDLE, it pretty much halts and will use the same amount of power, no matter the clock rate. The savings really come from changing the core voltage, which can be lower at low clock rates. With a proper power management controller, the voltage can be matched to the clock in many steps, but on the ZeroPi there are only 2 states: 1.1V and 1.3V. It switches to the higher voltage when the CPU is clocked higher than 816MHz, so on the OPZ you lose almost nothing by limiting the range of the ondemand governor to 816MHz - 1008MHz.
Unless you have a realtime application that never allows the CPU to sleep, I don't think there is any point to a lower clock than 816MHz. 

[TWM]

Many thanks! That's very helpful. And to answer the question above, yes, I tried conservative as governor as well. It was also not really usable.

Edited April 21, 2020 by TWM