Dell PowerEdge 2950 III - CPU power management problems

[David Wood]

Dear all,

In message <YnwmlzIfBaQIFAqP at wood2.org.uk>, David Wood 
<david at wood2.org.uk> writes
>I'm having problems with CPU power management on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 
>III.
>
>I've posted this to freebsd-acpi in the first instance - though it may 
>finish up belonging on freebsd-stable. As I am almost certain there are 
>bugs in teh DSDT, I thought I'd start on freebsd-acpi.

Dell have just shipped the 2.3.1 BIOS for this hardware, which fixes the 
DSDT bugs.


If I have correctly understood recent messages on freebsd-stable, CPU 
frequency control and Enhanced SpeedStep is broken for modern Core 2 and 
Xeon processors. At least my 2950 III is now ready for whatever fixes 
may become available to that code.

I believe the problem may be that FreeBSD doesn't know it needs to 
change the frequency of several cores at once - after all, my 8 core box 
is two chips of two processors of two cores each.


If any developer is interested in fixing the CPU frequency control / 
Enhanced SpeedStep code, I might be able to contribute a small amount of 
finance towards this work. Please email me directly.


Best wishes,




David
-- 
David Wood
david at wood2.org.uk