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I lost a third of my computer!



Here's a wierd bug for you:

I noticed yesterday that my cpu (athlon 2800+ laptop) was never going over 1.4 ghz (I use the cpu frequency monitoring applet in Gnome). I looked in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq and it was set to 1.467 even though scaling_available_freq said it went up to 2.120. I could not change the value in scaling_max_freq because it kept reverting back (I echoed the correct max into it as root). After much research (change /etc/default/cpufrequtils.conf), I ran cpufreq-info and it basically said it was a hardware liimitation (the hardware was reporting this limitation). I went to report it as a Festy bug, but I noticed it has been reported (a couple times, actually). None of the suggestions work. Just for fun, I booted into Windows and ran perfmon. It has a variable for cpu speed you can monitor. Wow! It is limited there also! For more fun, I booted back into Feisty with acpi=off, and my cpu speed was back up to 2.12 GHZ (at least that was what was in /proc and what the applet said). I immediately booted back into Windows and checked perfmon, but it was back to a limit of 1.467. Wierd! I also booted a Dapper 6.06 live CD just to check if it was a kernel issue (it previously had maxed at 2.12 under Dapper), but dapper also had it maxing at 1.467.

I reported all of this at lanchpad, but now I am wondering if one of 2 things has happened:

1. Ubuntu Feisty broke my bios (acpi table, maybe). However, I hope nothing in Linux is writing back to the bios, but I couldn't help but wonder.

2. ACPI somehow died or went wacky on my laptop. If so, I am out of luck. It is not under warranty and there are no bios upgrades for my laptop. If so, I wonder how that would happen.

Have you ever seen anything like this. I am also posting it to my Linux user's group to see if anyone else has seen this. It feels like a third of my computer has fallen off!!


Faith without Works is Dead...