ichss makes ThinkPad R31 toasty

[Jim Eberle]

I recently upgraded the BIOS (famous last words) on my ThinkPad R31.
I've been running FreeBSD 7.0RC3 on it for several months now. I had
noticed before the BIOS upgrade, that under high workloads the machine
would slow to a crawl. That is in fact why I did the upgrade. I thought
the BIOS was flaky or out of sync w/ what FreeBSD expected.

After the BIOS upgrade I noticed a new driver was loading: ichss.
Unfortunately, the machine now behaves like it had in the past under
high workload all the time. Just booting sends the temperature up to 90C
(formerly 57C), starts the fan on high, and cuts performance to 70%.

Either the temperature readings are wrong (unlikely), or simply enabling
SpeedStep ICH is making the machine into a toaster. :)

I added the following to device.hints:

  hint.ichss.0.disabled="1"

Obviously, w/o ichss (or est or acpi_perf which aren't supported by this
hardware) there are no ".freq/.freq_levels" sysctls, so cpufreq won't run. 

Without ichss the machine behaves OK under normal loads but still drops
into ultra-slow mode when hot. I would like to get cpufreq + ichss
working to do some sort of CPU throttling, such that the machine slows
down to cool off, and then, and this is the important part, _speeds up
again_!

Any guidance much appreciated,
Jim Eberle

[ Sorry for the length of this message, BTW ]

/var/log/messages -- trimmed:

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #5: Thu Mar  6 12:35:35 PST 2008
root at thinkpad.local:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/THINKPAD
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU                1066MHz (1067.50-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6b1  Stepping = 1
Features=0x383f9ff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE>
ath_hal: 0.9.20.3 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
acpi0: <IBM Cnote2> on motherboard
pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib0
agp0: <Intel 82830M (830M GMCH) SVGA controller> on vgapci0
uhci0: <Intel 82801CA/CAM (ICH3) USB controller USB-A> port 0xa4a0-0xa4bf irq 11 at device 29.0 on pci0

/var/log/messages -- with ichss ON:

ichss: enabling SpeedStep support
ichss: enabling SpeedStep support <-- loads twice???
ichss0: <SpeedStep ICH> on cpu0
cpufreq: initializing cpufreq0
cpufreq: initializing one-time data for cpufreq0