Bad CPU autoscaling is making games unplayable for a lot of users

[Scott Ritchie]

Over the past couple years I've been able to try out Wine games on many
different environments -- laptops, desktops, even cloud servers.

On many occasions, I've discovered that a game appears to run
functionally but slowly, however upon further investigation I find that
forcing the CPU to run at 100% "performance" mode can make the game
playable.

There are a few tools to do this (eg cpufreq-indicator for desktop
users), however the long and short of it is that, for many users, I
suspect they just assume Wine is slow and give up on that particular game.


1) Since Wine is truly CPU-bound here, why isn't it provoking the
autoscaling to actually speed up the processor?  I've seen this happen
on systems running with AC power and 100% battery life.

2) Is this a kernel issue?  A distribution power management
configuration issue?  Or is there something we can do in Wine itself to
be less courteous?


Mostly I've seen this on Ubuntu, however I'm sure it's affecting other
distributions that have any sort of power managment whatsoever as it can
be quite tricky to get this right.


Thanks,
Scott Ritchie