Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 18:41:35 +1100 (EST) From: Ian Smith <smithi@nimnet.asn.au> To: Kevin Oberman <oberman@es.net> Cc: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ThinkPad x61s Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.1080309173848.22071A-100000@gaia.nimnet.asn.au> In-Reply-To: <20080309020611.D0DCD4500F@ptavv.es.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 00:33:40 +0100
> > From: Guy Brand <gb@isis.u-strasbg.fr>
> > Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org
> >
> > Dan Langille (dan@langille.org) on 04/03/2008 at 07:34 wrote:
> >
> > > Are you running FreeBSD on a ThinkPad x61s? Details please...
> >
> > I do.
> >
> > FreeBSD FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #58: Sun Mar 2 17:36:43 CET 2008
> > snd_hda, acpi_ibm, if_wpi for hardware specific support. Xorg
> > 7.3 working out of the box. cpufreq behaves strangely going
> > from AC power to battery mode and back, so I removed it from
> > the kernel config. Fan and thermal controls are fine. 6-cell
> > battery provides ca. 260 mn of work time.
>
> My experience is that you want to remove cpufreq on any newer
> ThinkPad. My T43 "works" with CPUFREQ, but behaves very strangely.
> Without it I see:
> dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 2000/27000 1750/23625 1600/22600 1400/19775 1333/19666 1166/17207 1066/16733 932/14641 800/13800 700/12075 600/10350 500/8625 400/6900 300/5175 200/3450 100/1725
If I'm not mistaken, these are generated from ACPI tables in the
absence of est/p4tcc (or whatever cpufreq drivers are appropriate)
taking over. Does your dmesg without cpufreq show acpi_perf?
> Without it,
(Your correction noted)
> With it,
> I no longer see any energy values (all show '0') and going
> on/off battery sometimes does not switch powerd properly. Also the
> system will automatically drop the maximum speed to 800 MHz when on
> battery.
Why 800MHz, I wonder? Maybe that's falling back to a BIOS setting?
> This all happens without cpufreq.
What values do you have for these (defaults from /etc/defaults/rc.conf)?
performance_cx_lowest="HIGH" # Online CPU idle state
performance_cpu_freq="HIGH" # Online CPU frequency
economy_cx_lowest="HIGH" # Offline CPU idle state
economy_cpu_freq="HIGH" # Offline CPU frequency
The thing you've both noted about switching from AC to battery and back
is likely /etc/rc.d/power_profile, using the above variables, fighting
with powerd's notion of what cpu freq should be set according to load,
which causes momentary variations on switching AC/battery profiles
unless {performance,economy}_cpu_freq are set to "NONE".
The default economy_ values were changed some time ago from "LOW" due to
problems, I suspect because modern processors can go so slow like your
100MHz, even 75MHz, unless deliberately overridden with a higher minimum
value to remove the lower speed entries from dev.cpu.0.freq_levels
As this appears quite common, and poorly/un documented, I'm starting to
wonder whether power_profile ought to specifically check if powerd is
running before messing with dev.cpu.0.freq at all? I don't think that
switching _cx_lowest causes any similar strange effects, and freq switch
is just momentary until powerd reasserts itself, but it freaks people :)
Thoughts?
cheers, Ian
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.96.1080309173848.22071A-100000>