Various problems, atapi, acpi (S3), cpufreq (est)

[Eygene Ryabinkin]

Harald,

Wed, May 20, 2009 at 12:28:45PM +0200, Harald Schmalzbauer wrote:
> Eygene Ryabinkin schrieb am 20.05.2009 11:28 (localtime):
> > Harald, good day.
> ...
> > Could you, please, provide the output from 'acpidump -dt | grep -i cpu |
> > grep -i alias' and your MB model.  This may not help to decrease power
> 
> Thanks for your answer and a good da also, Eygene.

No problems ;))

> Here's the reqested output, only without alias greped. Since I found a
> BIOS updates I also get est0, but like you correctly assumed with
> "attach returned 6".
> acpidump -dt | grep -i cpu
[...]

No aliases.  Pity, then the mentioned PR won't be able to help you.
I could try to glance over the est attach issue if you'll post full
dmesg, 'acpidump -dt', 'sysctl dev.cpu', 'sysctl dev.est' and 'sysctl
dev.cpufreq'.

Regarding the original problem about increased power consumption: you
seem to have desktop CPU with only one SpeedStep frequency, but with TCC
cycle throttling.  This can be easily verified: you should see only one
frequency in dev.est.0.freq_settings, but multiple (8, with stepping of
12.5%) frequencies in dev.cpu.0.freq_levels.  Throttling is known not to
decrease power consumption and your increase of 1W can be attributes as
a measurment error (can't say for sure -- statistics and knowledge on
how you had measured the consumption is needed).

There is good set of notes from Alexander Motin on the power consumption
on 8-CURRENT,
  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-May/006436.html
perhaps this will give you some further ideas.

> The motherboard is a GigaByte P35DS4

And you're running the latest known BIOS, aren't you?

> I already used cd1 as device, hence the atapicam device. Fortunately I 
> need the ODD really seldom, but for the last two years I had to boot 
> another software because none of my drives worked. Am I the only one 
> with that massive problems? Could the AHCI mode be the culprit?

Once I had similar messages with AHCI mode turned on some Asus MBs, so I
am turning it off regularily.  You can also try just enhanced SATA mode
set via BIOS -- it could help.
-- 
Eygene
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