Dual Opteron / FreeBSD 5 & 6 / powerd results in hard hangs

[Justin Suyk]

Hi,

We have a dual Opteron server which supports the PowerNow technology and 
that technology we want to use to save unneeded power. For that reason 
we are trying to get powerd and cpufreq going, but we are running in a 
lot of troubles when we ennable the powerd program. Under 5.4 RELEASE 
and stable hard hangs are occuring just 2 seconds after enabling powerd 
and under FreeBSD 6 the machines hangs after about a minute or two.

Under 5.4 we noticed that only one of the CPU was triggerd by powerd, 
and thus resulting in a hard crash because the other CPU was still 
running full speed. Under 6 that was fixed, the two CPU's were seen as 
one CPU by powerd and so the trigger to run on an lower clockspeed was 
picked up by the Opterons. But after 2 minutes the machine hangs again.

What can be the problem here?

Thanx in advance,

Justin.