Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 22:49:01 -0700 From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org> To: Alexander Motin <mav@freebsd.org> Cc: FreeBSD acpi <freebsd-acpi@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD-Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>, freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Fighting for the power. Message-ID: <4A07BC4D.7080604@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <49FE1826.4060000@FreeBSD.org> References: <49FE1826.4060000@FreeBSD.org>
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Alexander Motin wrote: > I would like to summarize some of my knowledge on reducing FreeBSD power > consumption and describe some new things I have recently implemented in > 8-CURRENT. ... This is great work! > - C3 state allows CPU completely stop all internal clocks, reduce > voltage and disconnect from system bus. This state gives additional > power saving effect, but .... local APIC timers in > each CPU core, used by FreeBSD as event sources on SMP, are not > functioning. ... Originally, before SMP era, FreeBSD used i8254 (for HZ) > and RTC (for stats) chipset timers. I have made changes to 8-CURRENT to > resurrect them for SMP systems. To use them, you can disable local APIC > timers by adding to /boot/loader.conf: > hint.apic.0.clock=0 I experimented a little bit with this and had a few odd experiences: sysctl hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C3 did drop power consumption significantly but made the system pretty unresponsive. In particular, the system completely hung at shutdown. I presume the hang was the APIC timer problem you mentioned. I started to try the "hint.apic.0.clock", but noticed in your commit r191720: > Add hint.apic.0.clock tunable. Setting it 0 disables using > LAPIC timers as hard-/stat-/profclock sources falling back > to using i8254 and rtc timers. > ... > This technique is not working for SMP yet, as only one CPU > receives timer interrupts. But I think that problem could > be fixed by forwarding interrupts to other CPUs with IPI. Is anyone looking at this yet? Tim
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