intel-turbo

Linux scripts to manage Turbo Boost on Intel CPUs

Description

These simple scripts are used through two systemd services to enable or disable the Intel Turbo Boost technology on any Linux distribution that supports the intel_pstate frequency driver. To check if your system supports it, open the terminal and run:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_driver

It should return intel_pstate for each CPU thread.

Installation

It is very easy to install these scripts. The intel folder in opt should be placed under the /opt/ folder of your Linux distribution, while the intel-noturbo and intel-turbo service files should be placed under the system subfolder of the systemd directory, located in /etc/systemd/system/. I've also put them inside their correct destination folders right in the repository so you can quickly identify where they should be dropped. If you want to enable or disable Turbo Boost at startup, only one of the two services should be enabled, because they go in conflict with each other. For example, if you are on a laptop and want your fans to be quieter and the battery to last longer, you can start the service and disable Turbo Boost automatically at startup with:

sudo systemctl enable --now intel-noturbo.service

Or, you can just disable turbo manually at your will and not automatically at startup with:

sudo systemctl start intel-noturbo.service

While you can check the service status with:

sudo systemctl status intel-noturbo.service

You can also directly ask the system if Turbo Boost is enabled or disabled after applying either of the services with:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

This returns:

• 0 if turbo is enabled;

• 1 if turbo is disabled.

Removal

If you want to uninstall both services, first you need to disable the one that is currently running and that's active on startup. Assuming that the noturbo service is active, you can disable it with:

sudo systemctl disable --now intel-noturbo.service

Once the active one is disabled, you can proceed to mask both services so they cannot be started by any means. You can do so with:

sudo systemctl mask intel-noturbo.service

sudo systemctl mask intel-turbo.service

You can now proceed to permanently remove the files from your system. You need to delete both the intel folder from /opt/ and the systemd files for these services.

sudo rm -r /opt/intel/

sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/intel-noturbo.service /etc/systemd/system/intel-turbo.service 

Usage outside of systemd

Not all Linux distributions come with the systemd daemon, but they may use other alternatives like OpenRC, runit or s6. In this case, you can still use the scripts but you can't enable them at startup with the method written above. What you can do instead is copy the intel folder in your system's /opt/ and follow one of the other methods listed here to enable their autoexecution at startup. If you only want to execute them manually at your own pace, you can do so by opening the terminal and writing one of these two commands.

The first disables Turbo Boost, the second enables it.

sudo ./opt/intel/intel_noturbo.sh

sudo ./opt/intel/intel_turbo.sh

As an example, we can use the Cron Job method to automatically run one of these two scripts at startup on non-systemd distributions. To do so, you have to first make sure that cronie is installed on your system. Open the terminal, and do the following:

• If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, type

  sudo apt install cronie

• On Fedora or RHEL, type

  sudo yum install cronie

• On Arch Linux and its derivatives, type

  sudo pacman -S cronie

You can check if the installation was successful with:

crond -V

Now we need to edit the cron table to add our task which runs one of the two custom scripts on startup. Assuming we want to run the script to disable turbo, type:

crontab -e

Then add said task using the @reboot expression, which executes the code once at startup:

@reboot sh /opt/intel/intel_noturbo.sh

If you want to remove both scripts in the future, first you need to delete the task from the cron table, typing again crontab -e and removing the line previously added. You can then proceed to delete all files from your system, following the same method in Removal:

sudo rm -r /opt/intel/

sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/intel-noturbo.service /etc/systemd/system/intel-turbo.service 

License

• This project is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
• Copyright of @ShyVortex, 2023.