I find ondemand is allot slower than conservative for cpu bound tasks. My understanding is that performance wise, ondemand should be on par or slightly faster than conservative. My chip is an intel core 2 duo, I think 4300. I am using 2.6.35 from Ubuntu. On the kraken benchmark, ondemand completes in 34216.6ms +/- 2.3% where as conservative completes in 25699.3ms +/- 5.6% Again, it is my understanding that ondemand should not have this much of a slowdown.
a fix for this has been merged in .37-rc1: commit 3f78a9f7fcee0e9b44a15f39ac382664e301fad5 Author: David C Niemi <dniemi@verisign.com> Date: Wed Oct 6 16:54:24 2010 -0400 [CPUFREQ] add sampling_down_factor tunable to improve ondemand performance