CPU frequency remains capped when switching from powersave to performance unless balanced is applied first

[brenobaptista]

When switching from the powersave profile directly to throughput-performance, the CPU frequency remains capped at a lower value. If I switch to the balanced profile first, the CPU frequency is restored to a higher value and switching to throughput-performance afterward keeps that higher frequency.

I confirmed the impact using Geekbench 6: when switching directly from powersave to throughput-performance the benchmark score remains the same as in powersave, indicating that the CPU is limited.

Steps to reproduce:

sudo tuned-adm profile powersave
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

sudo tuned-adm profile throughput-performance
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

sudo tuned-adm profile balanced
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

sudo tuned-adm profile throughput-performance
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

tuned 2.26.0

Operating System: Fedora Linux 43
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.22.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.18.4-200.fc43.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.1 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: Intel® UHD Graphics
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU

[ver4a]

I've noticed this as well, I just want to add that in this weird state /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo is set to 1 (hence the lower frequency), so maybe it's tuned not configuring intel_pstate for throughput-performance profile?

A funny symptom of this is KDE Plasma's power/battery applet that reports this as "cpu running too hot", because (I think) it's not expected for turbo boost to be disabled in the performance profile in any other scenario :)

update: I was going to submit a PR, but there's one for it already #811, when that's merged I think this can be closed.

[pkoteswa]

we did observe this on CentOS.
If Tuned ADM is disable, set no_turbo = 0 and reboot the system, then system is starting with no_turbo = 0 only, turbo is not disabled.
If we enable the Tuned ADM and reboot the system, Turbo is getting disabled (no_turbo =1).
So Turbo is getting disabled only when we enable the Tuned.