CPU Governor in Pop!_OS
May 24, 2025So, I have a Lemur Pro 13 notebook running Pop!_OS. Since I first started using it, I noticed the fan noise gets very loud quite frequently. It took me a while to figure out the cause, but I finally discovered the reason: it was running in maximum performance mode.
The CPU performance is managed by a component of the operating system called the governor, which controls how the CPU frequency is adjusted based on system load.
In Pop!_OS, there are two available governors: performance and powersave. You can check which ones are available with:
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
performance powersave
You can check the current governor for each CPU core by running:
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
To change the governor to powersave for all CPUs, run:
echo powersave | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor