Laptop Perfomance: irqbalancer vs. intel_pstate

Today I uninstalled irqbalancer and I had some more performance gain on my GNOME desktop.

The CPUfreq control panel showed me IRQBALANCE DETECTED and they say:

Why I should not use a single core for power saving

  • Moderns OS/kernel work better on multi-core architectures.
  • You need at least 1 core for a foreground application and 1 for background system services.
  • Linux Kernel switches between CPU cores to avoid overheating, CPU thermal throttling and to balance system load.
  • Many CPUs have Hyper-Threading (HT) technology enabled by default. So there is no reason to run half of a physical CPU core.

Very simply said. I miss some contradictions.

I’m not certain how laptop drains battery running without intel_pstate=skylake_hwp set to disable. The pstate does make sense to me. Mainly I think it was irqbalancer. I have do do some stress testing later…

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