I've got a Cubox-i 4 running Armbian stretch 4.16.8 and I noticed that the frequency never seemed to drop below 996MHz (even when on zero load) using sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/cpuinfo_cur_freq whereas armbianmonitor -m showed the same, occasionally showing 792MHz.

 

Looking at Orange Pi Zero I managed to see what the issue might be.

 

Changing /etc/default/cpufrequtils to "powersave" dropped the frequency to 396MHz but stayed there even when under stress (stress -c 4 -t 60). Changing the value to "conservative" gave me what I wanted. 396MHz with no load, rising to 996MHz when under load.

 

Hopefully others might find this useful.

 

Using lsmod - shows only 3 modules:

cpufreq_powersave      16384  0
cpufreq_conservative    16384  1
cpufreq_userspace      16384  0

 

So the default setting "ondemand" isn't doing anything.

On 7/24/2018 at 12:14 PM, Iridium said:

Hopefully others might find this useful

 

Nope, this is not useful at all. See at the end of the thread you even referenced here!

 

Conservative will trash storage performance. We need an appropriate method to define sampling_rate with ondemand on some platforms/kernels but as usual zero help and zero user feedback. Instead inappropriate recommendations are spread.