Powerd and est / eist functionality

[John Long]

At 05:42 PM 3/27/2010, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
 >On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 04:51:49PM -0700, John Long wrote:
 >> At 02:14 AM 3/26/2010, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
 >> % dmesg | grep -i smbus
 >> pci0: <serial bus, SMBus> at device 31.3 (no driver attached)
 >
 >All this means is that there's a SMBus-class device sitting on the PCI
 >bus which has no driver attached to it.  Run "pciconf -lvc" and find the
 >device in question, and the output relevant to it.

none1 at pci0:0:31:3:      class=0x0c0500 card=0x50011458 chip=0x27da8086 
rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
     vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
     device     = '82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller'
     class      = serial bus
     subclass   = SMBus

put this in
# Intel Core/Core2Duo CPU temperature monitoring driver
device coretemp

# SMBus support, needed for bsdhwmon
device smbus
device smb
device ichsmb

now get this
ichsmb0 at pci0:0:31:3:    class=0x0c0500 card=0x50011458 chip=0x27da8086 
rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
     vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
     device     = '82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller'
     class      = serial bus
     subclass   = SMBus

%smbmsg -p
Probing for devices on /dev/smb0:
Device @0x10: w

Does not look to be much there if I am doing this right..

 >Given the topic of discussion, I'd say your northbridge is Intel-based,
 >which means you need the smb, smbus, and ichsmb drivers loaded.  You can
 >load these as kernel modules as well.  When loading them, do not specify
 >the trailing ".ko".  See the ichsmb(4) man page for some terse details.
 >
 >Even if you get a driver attached to the SMBus piece of the northbridge,
 >like I said, there's no guarantee there's a H/W monitoring IC that's
 >wired to the SMBus.  As stated, I don't believe in probing slave
 >addresses on the SMBus, so the slave address would have to come from
 >Gigabyte, or...
 >
 >There's a program for Windows (9x/2K/XP/Vista) called SpeedFan which
 >does do probing and can/does support SMBus.  I have no idea if it works
 >on Windows 7 or not:
 >
 >http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
 >
 >If SpeedFan shows you all the data you expect/want, and indicates it's
 >talking to a H/W IC over SMBus, then I could add support for your board
 >to bsdhwmon (since your motherboard does provide acceptable SMBIOS
 >tables for identification).  I'd still need to know what slave address
 >the chip had, and what exact model of H/W IC it was.  SpeedFan might
 >provide that.

I have a feeling that my smbus is just not hooked up, nothing there.. 
speedfan looks cool tho.

 >
 >It would also help (me at least) if you could reboot your system, go
 >into your BIOS and find whatever menu item is associated with Hardware
 >Monitoring and write down all of the shown attributes and their values.
 >What the BIOS shows is what should be accurate above all else.

 >I can point you to numerous present-day motherboards that work just fine
 >with cpufreq(4) and est under RELENG_8, and also work when using
 >acpi_throttle.  Specifically, Supermicro PDSMi+, X7SBA, and X7SBL-L2
 >boards.  I'm sure there are many others.  In all of these are Core2Duo
 >or Core2Quad CPUs.  An example from the X7SBA system, running powerd:

It looks good, all working..

 >
 >I should note that the device attachment error (error 6) is something
 >I've seen on my PDSMi+ boards under RELENG_7 when EIST and C1 Enhanced
 >Mode were disabled in the BIOS.  FreeBSD would report that SpeedStep
 >existed but that it wasn't able to attach.
 >
 >I *explicitly* disabled those features in the BIOS since I saw some
 >bizarre process behaviour ("calcru: runtime went backwards ... for pid
 >X").

Have you tried to measure the wall power with a kill-a-watt yet or can you? 
I am curious that things are actually working and tdp goes down when powerd 
is running vs not.
About 20.00 - lowes, costco 
etc  http://www.google.com/search?q=kill-a-watt  very handy to check 
everything out. My system takes about 15 secs to lower freq to min and the 
power goes up a watt each 5 secs or so. Yes, it looks like it is working 
but the power meter tells the truth.


John

 >--
 >| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
 >| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
 >| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
 >| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |