powerd not behaving with an Asus A8V-MX and Athlon 64 X2 3800+

[George Hartzell]

George Hartzell writes:
 > 
 > I have an Asus A8V-MX motherboard with an AMD Athlong 64 X2 3800+ CPU
 > and I'm trying to run powerd to keep it cooler/quieter/greener.
 > [...]

[for the archives]

I now have powerd running w/out any complaints, although I still don't
understand what was causing the problem.

I've added the following entries to /boot/loader.conf

  hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled="1"
  hint.acpi_throttle.1.disabled="1"

and then just run powerd by adding the following lines to /etc/rc.conf

  powerd_enable="YES"
  powerd_flags="-a adaptive"

and the system happily cycles between 2000, 1800, and 1000 MHz
depending on what it's doing (it actually never hangs out at 1800 for
long, just while transitioning between the extremes).

I guess that the CPU or bios or ??? was advertising support for
throttling that it didn't really implement, but I don't really
understand the why's and hows.

g.