runaway intr problems: powerd and/or hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest related

[Andriy Gapon]

on 27/08/2010 19:19 Doug Barton said the following:
> Yes, it improved things greatly. I first ran with just powerd for several hours
> and that worked fine. The next day I was able to use powerd and cx_lowest=C2 for
> the better part of a day (including watching a few flash videos). By the end of
> the day intr started to run away again, so not out of the woods yet, but at least
> this shows we're going in the right direction. Also, while poking around in the
> BIOS settings I noticed in one of the "information only" screens that I don't
> usually visit one line about the "minimum cpu speed" is 1.00 GHz, which the sysctl
> output above seems to verify. So where the throttling code was getting all those
> other numbers I don't know.
> 
> Meanwhile I've actually not been running FreeBSD for most of this week I've been
> working on re-partitioning my new disk and running ubuntu. So 2 interesting pieces
> of information there, first the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" for the gnome that
> comes with ubuntu never goes below 1 GHz, so that bit seems extra verified.
> Second, I can watch all the flash videos I want while doing other stuff in the
> background (like restoring the backups of my data) without any problems, so add
> that to windows in terms of OS' that work on this same hardware. Now that I have
> finally figured out how to boot windows, linux, and 2 FreeBSDs on the same disk
> I'll be able to set up 7-stable i386 and 9-current amd64 to see how they compare
> to the 9-current i386 I was using previously; so I should have more information in
> a few days.

Cool!
Meanwhile can you double-check what timers does Linux use there?
(No idea how to do that, especially if it's NO_HZ kernel).

-- 
Andriy Gapon