Re: Regression in 4.8 - CPU speed set very low

From: Larry Finger
Date: Sun Sep 18 2016 - 22:55:25 EST


On 09/14/2016 11:00 AM, Larry Finger wrote:
On 09/09/2016 12:39 PM, Larry Finger wrote:
I have found a regression in kernel 4.8-rc2 that causes the speed of my laptop
with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4600M CPU @ 2.90GHz to suddenly have a maximum cpu
frequency of ~400 MHz. Unfortunately, I do not know how to trigger this problem,
thus a bisection is not possible. It usually happens under heavy load, such as a
kernel build or the RPM build of VirtualBox, but it does not always fail with
these loads. In my most recent failure, 'hwinfo --cpu' reports cpu MHz of
396.130 for #3. The bogomips value is 5787.73, and the cpu clock before the
fault is 3437 MHz. Nothing is logged when this happens.

If I were to get a patch that would show a backtrace when the maximum CPU
frequency is changed, perhaps it would be possible to track this bug.

I have not yet found the bad commit, but I have reduced the range of commits a
bit. This bug has been difficult to trigger. So far, it has not taken over 1/2
day to appear in bad kernels, thus I am allowing three days before deciding that
a given trial is good. I never saw the problem with 4.7 kernels, but I did in
4.8-rc1. I also know that it appeared before commit 581e0cd. Commit 1b05cf6 did
not show the bug.

Testing continues.

And still does. My bisection seemed to be trending toward an improbable set of commits, and I needed to do some other work with the machine, thus I started running 4.8-rc6. It failed nearly 48 hours after the reboot, which indicated that using 3 days to indicate a "good" trial was likely too short. I am currently testing the first of the trial and will run it for at least a week. It is unlikely that these tests will be complete before 4,8 is released, even if -rc8 is needed. I will keep attempting to find the faulty commit.

Larry