Optimize battery life and computing power with auto-cpufreq

Always in View

As a service, auto-cpufreq goes about its business in the background. You won't know when a profile is enabled, when CPU cores are active, or what speed they run at unless you call the right tools in a terminal window. However, you can use a number of widgets or panel applets to visualize the CPU load and other system information. For instance, if you're using Gnome, you can obtain CPU information from the Gnome extension System Monitor and Power Manager [7], a tool that shows the load per core, as well as details such as the governor and the Turbo Boost mode (Figure 4).

Figure 4: System Monitor and Power Manager for the Gnome Shell shows the clock speed at which the CPU is running and which governor is active.

Conclusions

In our lab, auto-cpufreq succeeded in extending the battery life of the test system. Your success might depend on your hardware or the nature of the applications running on your system. You can integrate auto-cpufreq into an existing system without major changes and then remove it again without a trace if it doesn't fit the bill. To remove auto-cpufreq, call the auto-cpufreq installer a second time with the --remove option.

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