Powerd and est / eist functionality
John Long
fbsd2 at sstec.com
Wed Mar 24 20:45:23 UTC 2010
At 11:27 PM 3/22/2010, Alexander Motin wrote:
>John Long wrote:
>> Hello, I am putting together a couple update servers. Went with c2d
>> E7500 on gigabyte G41M-ES2L boards. fbsd 8.0 release generic (so far)
>> amd64, 1g mem, 1tb wd cavier blk, fresh system.
>> My Kill-a-watt shows 41 watts idle and when I enable powerd then it
>> climbs to 43 watts idle.
>> It shows that the freq is controlled well, goes down to 365 mhz but
>> the tdp is not decreased, rather it increases.
>> If I disable eist, c1 and c3 helpers in bios, as per suggestion in
>> mail archive, then it adds 1 watt to both figures. I was hoping to get
>> this total tdp down to a very low amount, and it is but it should
>> theoretically go lower with powerd, right?
>> The bios reports 1.268V and 26C temp. I was hoping that the voltage
>> would go down to .85 or so when powerd lowered the freq to 365 etc.
>> Healthd does not seem to know what monitoring chip it is and I have no
>> idea unless I install xp (ugh) and run something from cpuid.com on it.
>> What is a good/better/best monitoring program, mbmon and bsdhwmon are
>> untried for they are not current I see. Or what do I do from here to
>> fix this problem?
>> thx,
>> John
>> dmesg shows
>> cpu0: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
>> est0: <Enhanced SpeedStep Frequency Control> on cpu0
>> est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
>> est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 6160b2506000b25
>> device_attach: est0 attach returned 6
>> p4tcc0: <CPU Frequency Thermal Control> on cpu0
>> cpu1: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
>> est1: <Enhanced SpeedStep Frequency Control> on cpu1
>> est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
>> est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 6160b2506000b25
>> device_attach: est1 attach returned 6
>> p4tcc1: <CPU Frequency Thermal Control> on cpu1
>> powerd -v
>> powerd: unable to determine AC line status
>> load 0%, current freq 2926 MHz ( 0), wanted freq 2834 MHz
>> load 0%, current freq 2926 MHz ( 0), wanted freq 2745 MHz
>> .......
>> load 3%, current freq 365 MHz ( 7), wanted freq 365 MHz
>> load 0%, current freq 365 MHz ( 7), wanted freq 365 MHz
>
>Your ACPI BIOS seems not reporting tables required to control EIST. So
>powerd probably uses only thermal throttling, which is not really
>effective for power saving on modern CPUs. You should check your BIOS
>options or may be update BIOS.
>
>If you have no luck with EIST - try to use C-states if BIOS reports at
>least them. It also can be quite effective.
>
>--
>Alexander Motin
Thanks for the info, I did try to kick it to C3 and that helped poquito
amount. Everything is enabled in bios that matters to this, that does help
a little too but powerd actually raises tdp a little. See other recent
reply for more info.
Thanks,
John
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