SpeedStep - heldersrvio/PureDarwin GitHub Wiki
SpeedStep is a technology from Intel to throttle the CPU's clock speed when it is not fully utilized in order to save power. This is especially useful for mobile devices and servers.
On a PureDarwin system, you can use the VoodooPower kernel extension in order to use SpeedStep.
On Intel Atom systems, PureDarwin 9 is known to work well with the VoodooPowerMini.kext (Leopard version) that. (On PureDarwin 10, you'll use the Snow Leopard version instead.)
You can download it from http://www.superhai.com/darwin.html
After downloading VoodooPowerMini.kext, you can install it on your PureDarwin 9 system:
sudo chown root:wheel 755 VoodooPowerMini.kext sudo chmod -R 755 VoodooPowerMini.kext mv VoodooPowerMini.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ kextload /System/Library/Extensions/VoodooPowerMini.kext # Rebuild kext cache with kextload
Now, you can verify that it is working:
toor@PureDarwin:~% sysctl -a | grep cpufrequency hw.cpufrequency = 800015400 hw.cpufrequency_max: 1600030800 hw.cpufrequency_min: 800015400
If hw.cpufrequency is lower than hw.cpufrequency_max in low-CPU usage situations, then SpeedStep is working correctly.
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