I've been running with the schedutil CPU governor for several weeks now. It's reduced my Pi5's average power consumption slightly and led to a system that feels more "snappy" than when using ondemand.
If you run the following in the terminal, you'll see that ondemand skips a wide range of available clock speeds.
This doesn't happen with schedutil as all available clock speeds are used. It's also much faster to respond to clock speed change requirements.
You can change to schedutil by doing the following...
You should see a file with the contents shown below. (If you don't, now would be a good time to stop.)
Edit the line replacing ondemand with schedutil, thus.
Ctrl+X, then Y to save changes. Then reboot.
You can check which CPU governor is currently being used by typing the following into the terminal.
You should now have very similar performance to using the performance governor but with reduced average power consumption.
If you run the following in the terminal, you'll see that ondemand skips a wide range of available clock speeds.
Code:
watch -n 10 cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/stats/time_in_stateYou can change to schedutil by doing the following...
Code:
sudo nano /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/60-ondemand-governor.rulesCode:
KERNEL=="cpu*", SUBSYSTEM=="cpu", ATTR{cpufreq/scaling_governor}="ondemand"Code:
KERNEL=="cpu*", SUBSYSTEM=="cpu", ATTR{cpufreq/scaling_governor}="schedutil"You can check which CPU governor is currently being used by typing the following into the terminal.
Code:
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_governorStatistics: Posted by GTR2Fan — Sun Sep 07, 2025 2:56 pm