[Xperia 10 II] All cores permanently on, high battery drain

Bug Reports
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#21

I think @rinigus wrote zgovernor for this exact type of issue.

It is specific to SailfishOS in that it listens for mce for screen on/off events
But you configure in an ini file what to do for these events, e.g. configure those exact cpufreq and online setting. This means that you can have other settings than the one set on boot even with the screen on.

(BTW @rinigus is there a reason this can’t be published in chum now that you removed the tama .ini file from the spec?)

#22

For testing, users could grab it from Tama repos and install that RPM. If we find it useful for others then there is a reason to add it to Chum as well.

However, I found that there was not much saving with zgovernor as Tama does switch all CPUs off quite reasonably. There was some issue with battery readouts and we ended having zgovernor only boosting GPU when needed (when only compositor was shown). So currently used config is

#23

I see, so now it is mostly used for the two compositor events. Just to clarify, the main one is increasing CPU frequency for the homescreen and the window shown is making the range wider again for the other windows?

I will try the tama package and report back, I have not seen the cpus going more than 4 out of six little ones idle on my device, and the two bigs are always on.

#24

Yes, that’s exactly how it works now. It is some kind of glitch in tama and got fixed by boosting GPU frequency in that particular case.

Corresponding issue: Frame rate low for compositor on idle · Issue #143 · sailfishos-sony-tama/main · GitHub

#25

I checked it out, but this only switches cores on/off based on whether the screen is on, right. It’s not going to switch off cores when the load drops enough so that it can still run everything with fewer cores?

To me, that’s the whole issue. Other phones with SFOS will happily run on two cores, until you start something taking more CPU, then some more cores come online. When that load disappears, the cores are switched off again. That saves quite a bit of battery. This works on my XA2 and on a 10, but not on my 10 II.

#26

Thanks for reporting this @martijntje, and everyone for the discussion. I’ve logged this internally, and also tagged it here as “tracked”.