unable to set cpu scaling frequency

Question

I have Ubuntu 15.04 on a clevo w605sj (Eurocom Electra 2), which gets very loud when the fan is on. Sometimes this is unacceptable, and so I'd actually rather throttle the CPU and take the performance hit. The problem is that I can't get the userspace governor to be available. Currently I have:

$ sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
performance powersave

So I ran:

$ sudo modprobe cpufreq_conservative cpufreq_ondemand cpufreq_powersave cpufreq_stats cpufreq_userspace freq_table

This command appears to succeed, as I get no error messages. However,

$ lsmod | grep freq

returns nothing. I don't know much about modules, so I may be making a very simple mistake. I'm trying to follow this guide here: https://www.pantz.org/software/cpufreq/usingcpufreqonlinux.html . Here's the output of cpufreq-info in case it's helpful:

$ cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 008: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2009
Report errors and bugs to [email protected], please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.20 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 3.20 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 3.01 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
analyzing CPU 1:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 1
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 1
  maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.20 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 3.20 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 2.92 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
analyzing CPU 2:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 2
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 2
  maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.20 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 3.20 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 3.06 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
analyzing CPU 3:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 3
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 3
  maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.20 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 3.20 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 3.03 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).

Answer 1

After a bit more digging, I found that the intel_pstate driver actually has a totally separate mechanism for this in /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/max_perf_pct: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/intel-pstate.txt . It would still be interesting to see if there's a way to make this play nicely with the old cpufreq governors way, and I'm still curious why modprobe appears to have no effect even though it returns no errors, but for now this will work for me.