Check if the cpu clock speed has historically changed in RHEL6

Question

I have a RHEL6 server running on a vmware-esxi host but no access to the host or vCenter.

I need to determine if the hosting provider is using power saving features one such way is to check if CPU Clockspeed varies.

How best to check this other than watching lscpu or cpuinfo?

Would this be logged in the messages file or elsewhere if it changed suddenly, if so how would the error appear so I could easily grep for it.

Thanks

Possible duplicate of What is the correct way to view your CPU speed on Linux? — , Mar 28 '19 at 16:39
That shows how to see it currently, I want to know if an error is logged with a timestamp if it suddenly changes. I could just watch lscpu and echo it out to a file but don't want to recreate functionality that might already exist. — Koffee, Mar 28 '19 at 17:07
You can monitor frequency setting with cpupower frequency-info, although I don't think cpu frequency itself is stored in any log. — jimmij, Mar 29 '19 at 09:16

maxschlepzig · Answer 1 · 2020-04-26T08:45:41.317

Even in a non-virtualized environment lscpu and /proc/cpuinfo may return incorrect values.

But in a virtualized environment the VM host is able to present to you arbitrary values via these interfaces.

Usually, you can use some CPU counters to derive the real CPU frequency.

But I bet the VM host can also manipulate such counters.

If you trust the VM host and know that the information available via /proc/cpuinfo is plausible then you can use a standard metric collection agent such as telegraf or collectd in your VM guest and configure it to periodically read the value from that file (or execute a helper script that provides this value in a standard format).

Check if the cpu clock speed has historically changed in RHEL6

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