Weird CPU speed
-
It must have been enabled at some point because the est(4) driver, speedstep, is loaded. The levels it's reporting, which are passed by the BIOS, are not useful though.
-
@stephenw10 Yes it was. I previously flipped several settings around.
What baffles me is the reported speed. And there's no way to tell whether it's real or not. -
Which one?
The speedstep levels there could be correct just not helpful. 700MHz and 800MHz are just that. 801MHz implies 800+turbo which could be anything, speedstep doesn't see the actual turbo speeds.
-
@stephenw10 The 1700-1900MHz one. That's with Speed Shift.
-
Speedshift does report the actual speed so I'd expect that to be real.
-
@stephenw10 Hmm, ok. But then something is not right anyway, because 1700MHz when there's less than 1% load.... that's just weird.
-
That's unexpected if it set to maximum efficiency for sure. At higher performance levels it might be since as I said just opening the dashboard would ramp it up significantly.
-
@stephenw10 I tried both extremes, and at max performance it went even higher, but never lower than 1700. But again, I don't know if it's the real speed, because the BIOS might be sketchy.
-
Mmm, I guess I'd be reading through the epic length threads there are for those boxes on the serverthehome forums. Seems like people have done a lot of investigation there:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-topton-nxxx-quad-nic-router.39685/ -
@Octopuss I believe that the machine that I have is identical, and I had similar problems. I was ultimately able to resolve them by loading a modded BIOS that exposed more settings than the one it came loaded with. I believe it was the PL1 setting that made the difference, but I'm not entirely sure. But I would direct you to this thread that I started:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/186104/topton-n100-reporting-402-mhz -
@TheNarc Thanks, I'll take a look.
But modding a BIOS... I'm not sure about that. But do you think the BIOS isn't bugged then, technically speaking? -
@Octopuss The way I look at, it's no more or less suspect than the BIOSes that come with these boxes. The way I think about it is that large companies (and even small companies) are not buying and using these boxes for business applications, so they do not present as an attractive target in that respect. So I feel that pretty much leaves "botnet nodes" as the most likely rationale for someone to compromise them. But there are far easier ways to amass botnet nodes than to make nefarious modifications to the BIOSes of niche devices used by some pfSense home users, then post them in a random forum thread and hope that a few dozen people use them. In my mind, the cost/benefit analysis just doesn't make sense for someone looking to attack/compromise vulnerable devices. But of course you have to come to your own decision.
-
@TheNarc I'm pretty confused what are you replying to :D What I was asking was whether you think it's a bug of the BIOS or just the result of certain CPU features not being exposed.
-
@Octopuss Oh I thought you were expressing concern with the security of using a modded BIOS. To your question, I wouldn't say that it was a bug in the BIOS that came loaded on the machine, just that it had certain settings hidden that I needed access to in order to get the expected/full speed out of the N100 CPU. And that's the only thing changed in the modded BIOS: expose more settings that were always there, but had been hidden,
