Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:02:37 +0100 From: Bruno Ducrot <ducrot@poupinou.org> To: Mike Jakubik <mikej@rogers.com> Cc: Victor Balada Diaz <victor@bsdes.net>, stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: powerd effectiveness Message-ID: <20060113150237.GA25115@poupinou.org> In-Reply-To: <43C6B94F.7060301@rogers.com> References: <43C5A261.1020407@rogers.com> <20060112075214.GA769@pato.euesrg02.net> <43C6B94F.7060301@rogers.com>
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On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 03:17:19PM -0500, Mike Jakubik wrote: > Victor Balada Diaz wrote: > >I know that this is not what you're asking for, but anyway: > > > >You should try sysutils/fvcool, it will reduce de heat a lot and the > >performance will not suffer. > > > --- > ===> WARNING > > This software can have a negative impact on system stability. In > particular while doing heavy duty work such as encoding music, > under certain conditions the system can freeze. > > Don't use this software in production or mission-critical > environments! > > Also note that this software is supposed to be used with AMD > Athlon (XP) an AMD Duron processors only. I don't think the latest statement is true. The Athlon 4 family use the same kind of power saving technology than the other version of the Athlon XP. Problem is that the Athlon 4 do have some annoying erratum that prevent it to use them for this purpose if a specific MSR is not set correctly by the BIOS, and when there is a half-frequency multiplier used. If an half-frequency multiplier is in use, it's possible the BIOS configured the northbridge such that the disconnect bit is not set, and then asserting the STPCLK# to the processor prevent it to go into a lower power state. see http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/23614.pdf errata #11 "PLL Overshoot on Wake-Up from disconnect causes Auto-Compensation Circuit to Fail" errata #14 "Processors with Half-Frequency Multipliers May Hang Upon Wake-up from disconnect" If the latter, it may be possible to put another multiplier by a bios option. For the former, well it may be possible the BIOS do not set correctly the CLK_CTL MSR. In order to check the value put to this MSR, I just written a dummy module here: http://people.freebsd.org/~bruno/read_clk_ctl.tar.bz2 If a value like that one: ctl_ctl = 60031223 (or something like such) then it's likely the bios is not upgraded or do not include some workaround. If something like that 20031223 then it's likely your BIOS do have this kind of workaround enabled already. -- Bruno Ducrot -- Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? -- Don't know. Don't care.
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