How to get current CPUPower governor

The current governor can be obtained as follows:

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

Note that cpu* will give you the scaling governor of all your cores and not just e.g. cpu0.

This solution might be system dependent, though. I'm not 100% sure this is portable.


In the latest Fedora release (26 alpha) on my Ryzen 7 system, I did this:

Fedora 26 alpha didn't have cpupower installed - so get it:

dnf install kernel-tools

This installs /etc/sysconfig/cpupower which should set performance level by default (edit the first line if you want a different level):

CPUPOWER_START_OPTS="frequency-set -g performance"
CPUPOWER_STOP_OPTS="frequency-set -g ondemand"

Now the critical bit - enable and start the cpupower service

systemctl enable --now cpupower

Confirm that performance level is set:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Reboot and repeat that cat command to confirm still performance