[ltp] Frustrating powertop results for a22m

[Damien Challet]

> My a22m has a 900Mhz Mobile Pentium III with Speedstep according to
> Thinkwiki. However, I tried to load cpufreq modules and the only one
> that will load is speedstep-lib and I need one like speedstep-smi or
> speedstep-ich to actually enable frequency scaling. The cpufreq
> documentation says SOME PIII Coppermine processors will work but not
> all. Is this one of the ones that has the primitive Speeedstep, in that
> you can choose normal operating mode or power saving mode in the BIOS
> and that's it? Because I tried the one that's optimized for battery life
> and it does little to help. My battery life is about 4 hours but there
> are still plenty of extra timer interrupts. If this is one of the
> Coppermines that can use cpufreq, there must be some trick to setting it
> up, because I can't figure it out.

I have the same problem with 2.6.24 and a x21. It used to work, but now it 
complains about latencies and keeps a constant frequency.

> Also, I don't think the system board has an HPET timer. I tried setting
> the clock=hpet kernel parameter but there were just as many extra timer
> interrupts as before, so I think it ignored the parameter and used
> clock=pit again.

it is hpet=force actually. Use a patched kernel, or 2.6.24. Using hardy's 
kernel 2.6.24-5 on gutsy works perfectly; 2.6.24-7 has more problems.