I have a MacBook Pro late 2013 that has frequency limitation at 800Mhz due to lack of battery. I'm trying to override this limitation running Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
$ uname -r
5.15.0-46-generic
$ lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Address sizes: 39 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4258U CPU @ 2.40GHz
CPU family: 6
Model: 69
Thread(s) per core: 2
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
Stepping: 1
Frequency boost: enabled
CPU max MHz: 2401,0000
CPU min MHz: 768,0000
BogoMIPS: 4800.26
Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp
lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3
sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm cpuid_fault epb invpcid_
single pti ssbd ibrs ibpb stibp tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid ept_ad fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid xsaveopt dtherm
ida arat pln pts md_clear flush_l1d
Virtualization features:
Virtualization: VT-x
Caches (sum of all):
L1d: 64 KiB (2 instances)
L1i: 64 KiB (2 instances)
L2: 512 KiB (2 instances)
L3: 3 MiB (1 instance)
NUMA:
NUMA node(s): 1
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3
Vulnerabilities:
Itlb multihit: KVM: Mitigation: VMX disabled
L1tf: Mitigation; PTE Inversion; VMX conditional cache flushes, SMT vulnerable
Mds: Mitigation; Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable
Meltdown: Mitigation; PTI
Mmio stale data: Not affected
Retbleed: Not affected
Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp
Spectre v1: Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
Spectre v2: Mitigation; Retpolines, IBPB conditional, IBRS_FW, STIBP conditional, RSB filling
Srbds: Mitigation; Microcode
Tsx async abort: Not affected
I've read a lot of documentations like CPU frequency scaling, and others questions and answers like here and here but any attempt to rise the cpu frequency up didn't work.
Until now I tried to:
-Change governor
-Ignore BIOS limitation by adding intel_pstate=disable processor.ignore_ppc=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
-Set to 1 the value in /sys/module/processor/parameters/ignore_ppc
-Set the frequency manually (among those available)
-Charge speedstep_lib module from available modules (I'm not familiar with linux modules)
but as you can see:
~$ cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: acpi-cpufreq
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency: 10.0 us
hardware limits: 768 MHz - 2.40 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.40 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.30 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.50 GHz, 1.30 GHz, 1.10 GHz, 900 MHz, 768 MHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative ondemand userspace powersave performance schedutil
current policy: frequency should be within 768 MHz and 2.40 GHz.
The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
current CPU frequency: 800 MHz (asserted by call to kernel)
boost state support:
Supported: yes
Active: yes
~# i7z
...
Socket [0] - [physical cores=2, logical cores=4, max online cores ever=2]
TURBO ENABLED on 2 Cores, Hyper Threading ON
Max Frequency without considering Turbo 2498.96 MHz (99.96 x [25])
Max TURBO Multiplier (if Enabled) with 1/2/3/4 Cores is 29x/29x/29x/29x
Real Current Frequency 799.67 MHz [99.96 x 8.00] (Max of below)
Core [core-id] :Actual Freq (Mult.) C0% Halt(C1)% C3 % C6 % Temp VCore
Core 1 [0]: 799.67 (8.00x) 100 66.7 0 0 63 0.6528
Core 2 [1]: 799.70 (8.00x) 100 66.7 0 0 62 0.6544
...
I strongly believe that Linux can overcome these limits.
Is there a way to override this CPU frequency limitation?
