anyone using pstate + thermald on sandy/ivy bridge thinkpads?

[tarvoke]

(possibly haswell machines too but I think that may require non-vanilla kernel efforts)

not much in thinkwiki, which seems odd, I thought this stuff was at least a couple years old. or maybe only has made it into recent kernels.

both are contributions from Intel's open source division:
- pstate is a scaling driver along the lines of e.g. acpi-cpufreq. er, sorta.
- thermald is an overall monitor/manager of A LOT OF STUFF

step 1: add 'intel_pstate=enable' to boot cmdline
step 2: install thermald - it's in the repos but latest version here (or add the ppa to your sources)

so far it's all working just fine with "zero conf" on my x220t - don't really notice any difference in temperatures/fanspeeds or performance behavior than before. thoughts on battery life will take a bit longer.

btw thermald will work with a number of other drivers on machines which don't support the pstate driver - e.g. the standard acpi-cpufreq, or even supposedly generic sysfs thermal indicators. I can vouch for the ACPI part personally anyway: thermald is running fine on x61t and x200t so far. same deal as above, fan/temp/performance seems to behave about the same, can't comment yet on battery life.

or have people found TLP to be a better manager, as it deals with not only cpu states/etc. but also bus voltages and other things - I've not tried it yet so no idea how straightforward it is to use.

[tarvoke]

forgot one small note: when using the pstate driver, the only available governors are performance and powersave. which makes a sort of sense I guess, it's trying to be an intelligent version of ondemand, so that would only get in the way.

[axur-delmeria]

I've installed Debian 8 on my X220, and have seen the pstate driver in action. I don't use thermald though; instead, I'm using laptop-mode-tools and still learning how to tweak and lower my idle power consumption.
Then again, since I have an mSATA SSD + HDD setup, my battery is sure to suffer.

One thing I noticed is that the CPU can reach maximum clock speed (and even Turbo Boost) even with just a 65 watt AC adapter plugged in and no battery installed. Is this proper behavior, or is the pstate driver overriding the BIOS speed lockdown?