There is a feature on Athlon chips for reducing clock speed when the processor is idle so keeping the system cooler and using less power.

There is a kernel module to support it but presumably other things need to be done to get it working. For instance gentoo pages describe a file /etc/conf.d/cpudyn with

INTERVAL=1
CPU_UP=0.5
CPU_DOWN=0.9
THROTTLING_LOW=7
CPUFREQ_25="/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq /sysfs/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq"
CPUFREQ_ACPI="/proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling"

Does anyone know how to do this in Slackware? I doubt if just enabling it in the BIOS is sufficient.

A bit more hunting around and I have found these two suggestions

Suggestion 1

rc.modules - Uncomment /sbin/modprobe powernow-k8

put in rc.local

if [ -f /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor ]; then
echo -n "Setting Scaling Governor : "
echo -n ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
echo "ondemand"
fi


Suggestion 2

put in rc.local


modprobe powernow-k8
modprobe cpufreq-ondemand

echo -n ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

I guess that apart from the difference in whether or not modprobe cpufreq-ondemand is necessary they amount to the same thing.