powerd and nvidia drivers not playing nicely together (Was: Re: Systems running hot?)

[Robert Noland]

On Thu, 2009-12-24 at 11:46 +0100, Bernd Walter wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 04:44:35PM +0200, Gleb Kurtsou wrote:
> > On (21/12/2009 19:18), Doug Barton wrote:
> > > b. f. wrote:
> > > > On 12/21/09, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > > >> b. f. wrote:
> > > >>>> no X! So I think to myself, what else did I change last night.... oh
> > > > 
> > > >>> acpi_perf? acpi_throttle? acpi_thermal? acpi_video?
> > > >> I haven't done anything special with the acpi stuff. The only thing
> > > >> that looks relevant from dmesg is: acpi_tz0: <Thermal Zone> on acpi0
> > > >>
> > > > 
> > > > Yes, but which components show up in 'sysctl -a | grep -ie acpi' ?
> > > 
> > > It's a long list, but here you go:
> > > http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/acpi-grep.txt
> > > 
> > > >>> Which nvidia driver?
> > > >> The latest.
> > > > 
> > > > Which video card?
> > > 
> > > nvidia0: <GeForce Go 7300>
> > I had similar problems with GeForce 8400M. GPU temperature could get up
> > to 100C in X, which increased CPU temperature in its turn.  I use
> > powerd, and had lockups with *_cx_lowest settings. I run amd64, i386 was
> > just fine on the same notebook. 
> 
> It is not just nvidia.
> I'm using two plain old PCI Matrox G400 and whenever I start X with
> powerd enabled I have a full freeze within 24 hours.
> It doesn't seem to be a problem to start powerd once X is runnning.
> Maybe it is something like tuning some delay loop with reduced clock
> rate, which then isn't long enough with increased speed.

FWIW, I run powerd on any machine that is capable.  I don't think that
it works on my box that has older opteron and the agp mga in it, or at
least I haven't figured out the right settings for that one.  i.e.
cpufreq doesn't attach...

I do run it on my core2duo's that I use for radeon, intel and nouveau
work and I've not seen any issues.  One of those boxes just works, the
other doesn't use est since the BIOS doesn't provide P-State
information.  powerd still runs reliably on both.

Also an atom 330 w/ intel gfx, which shows up as dual hyper-threaded
cores.

I have seen powerd hang a box, but it has been a while.  IIRC, the box
that I had the issue on was a dual Xeon, and when the frequencies went
too low or perhaps got out of sync, it would lock up.  I never
attributed the issue to X or drm.  It has been well over a year since I
had access to that box, so I might be mis-remembering some details.

robert.

-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD