Powerd flaky in newest RC3 (also since about a month…)

[p0ddie]

Hi,

currently on 2.0-RC3 (i386) built on Wed Jun 22 00:50:29 EDT 2011, happened with the release I upgraded from (somewhere around the first week of July), too.

I use a thin client with VIA Esther 1GHz CPU (Intel dual gigabit pci nic) as my pfsense box, 100mbit cable connection.

powerd does regulate the cpu frequency and the box runs a little cooler, but downloading from usenet stalls at around 2,5MB/s, surfing the web slows down to a crawl or times out, and the pfsense web gui is not accessible. The second I pause the usenet download, everything is back to normal.

If I deactivate powerd, I get 80-100mbit of my cable connection and surfing and the web interface are still useable, cpu being at max. 75% (really an improvement here, used to be around 95%).

It would be nice to be able to use powerd.

What can I provide in terms of logs/tests to help solve this problem?

Edit: Also, when powerd is activated I have a delay of about one second before a web site starts loading - this clearly seems to be dns forwarder related as I use it with fast and reliable dns servers in my town that give me a ping of 10-30ms on a regular basis.

[jimp]

Nothing we can really do about that, that's all up to the OS and the BIOS, probably that machine specifically.

[p0ddie]

nooo you make me use 1.5 watts more than I have to ;-)

I can live without it then. Out of general interest - does powerd in pfsense normally work well on Intel based hardware?

[jimp]

It really varies. Many systems are fine, those with odd BIOS (or old BIOS) implementations may be prone to more breakage than others.

[stephenw10]

Is it recognised correctly by the est driver?
If you run 'powerd -v' at the console you can get real time output as to what powerd is doing and is trying to do.
It works great on my Pentium-M box but it's a mobile cpu so well supported.

Steve