Intel P-state and CPUFreq Manager Widget

-Important

as of October 11, 2020, I'm not willing to maintain this widget anymore. I will maintain it based only to my personal needs. I thank you for your support and feedback all this time. Hope the community will take over from here and make the widget even better than it is now.

What it is

Intel P-state and CPUFreq Manager is a KDE Plasma widget in order to control the frequencies of Intel CPUs and their integrated GPUs for any modern Intel Processors running in Active Mode with HWP or Active Mode Without HWP. It can also manage the processor's energy consumption through Energy-Performance Preference (EPP) knob (if supported) or the Energy-Performance Bias (EPB) knob (otherwise).

Furthermore, it allows you to interact with the following vendor specific settings

1. Dell's Thermal Management Feature through libsmbios library.

2. LG Gram laptop Battery care limit, USB charge and Fan mode features (on kernel 4.20 and higher).

3. Nvidia PowerMizer Settings.

What it isn't

This is just a GUI widget and it is not meant to replace TLP, powertop or any other power management / energy consumption service. It is meant just to provide quick access to sysfs settings related to Intel Processors and in fact it can run on top of TLP.

Why

As the trend in modern laptops continues to be more CPU power in more slim chassis design and as the software and becomes more demanding, it is becoming harder to find a combination of power performance and/or energy consumption settings to fit all your daily tasks that require different levels of performance.

This widget's purpose is to expose to the user hardware and kernel settings that may be useful in cases you need to adjust such a setting from the comfort of your graphical interface using point and click or tap interactions even in cases that a keyboard isn't available.

How to install

First of all you need to be in sudoers' group. After that you can just clone the code and install it using the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/jsalatas/plasma-pstate
cd plasma-pstate
sudo ./install.sh

Notice: If your processor doesn't support EPP(ie older generations without HWP), then you need also to install the x86_energy_perf_policy which (in case of Ubuntu 18.04 distros) is provided by the linux-tools package and can be installed using the following command

sudo apt install linux-tools-generic linux-tools-`uname -r`

How to update

Assuming that you have checked out the latest code, you just need to run the following commands as root:

sudo kpackagetool5 -g -t Plasma/Applet -u gr.ictpro.jsalatas.plasma.pstate

sudo chmod 755 /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/gr.ictpro.jsalatas.plasma.pstate/contents/code/set_prefs.sh 

Contributions

Please feel free to clone, hack, and contribute anything you may find useful, especially in relation to similar to Dell's Thermal Management Feature that may be available in other hardware platforms.

Issues

The widget uses a shell script that needs to be run as root user (sudo) and which apparently floods your log files with security related messages as described in issue #16.

If you want to get rid of these messages, please see a workaround at

https://github.com/jsalatas/plasma-pstate/wiki/Too-many-messages-in-system-log