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    Powerd

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • H
      Highroller
      last edited by

      Hello,

      I have enabled Powerd on my box to save power. I have left Powerd in the default setings, my question is how do I know it's working, is there a log I can review?

      Running Pfsense 2.0 release, i386, no packages

      Thanks

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      • U
        UrbanSk
        last edited by

        Hi!

        I use powerd and on the dashboard i can see in CPU Type, this info:
        Type Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 230 @ 1.60GHz
        Current: 1199 MHz, Max: 1599 MHz

        This info is not available if powerd is disabled.

        Regards,

        UrbanSk

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        • H
          Highroller
          last edited by

          @UrbanSk:

          Hi!

          I use powerd and on the dashboard i can see in CPU Type, this info:
          Type Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 230 @ 1.60GHz
          Current: 1199 MHz, Max: 1599 MHz

          This info is not available if powerd is disabled.

          Regards,

          UrbanSk

          Thanks, I have always had the CPU type, I guess the current Mhz is Powerd?

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          • H
            Highroller
            last edited by

            OK, so I toggled Powerd on and off and yes I now see that the current Mhz is controlled by Powerd, Great! Now is there anything in the Bios I need to enable or disable to allow Powerd to control harddrives or other items? Right now API power management is enabled, but I have SMART Harddrives in the BIOS disabled. Does Powerd need SMART to be able to spin down the drive?

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            • D
              dreamslacker
              last edited by

              @Highroller:

              OK, so I toggled Powerd on and off and yes I now see that the current Mhz is controlled by Powerd, Great! Now is there anything in the Bios I need to enable or disable to allow Powerd to control harddrives or other items? Right now API power management is enabled, but I have SMART Harddrives in the BIOS disabled. Does Powerd need SMART to be able to spin down the drive?

              PowerD is used to throttle the processor, not the harddrives.

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              • H
                Highroller
                last edited by

                @dreamslacker:

                @Highroller:

                OK, so I toggled Powerd on and off and yes I now see that the current Mhz is controlled by Powerd, Great! Now is there anything in the Bios I need to enable or disable to allow Powerd to control harddrives or other items? Right now API power management is enabled, but I have SMART Harddrives in the BIOS disabled. Does Powerd need SMART to be able to spin down the drive?

                PowerD is used to throttle the processor, not the harddrives.

                This is from the FreeBSD web site: The powerd utility should also power down idle disks and other components
                    besides the CPU.

                http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=powerd#end

                Am I reading this wrong?

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                • D
                  dreamslacker
                  last edited by

                  @Highroller:

                  This is from the FreeBSD web site: The powerd utility should also power down idle disks and other components
                       besides the CPU.

                  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=powerd#end

                  Am I reading this wrong?

                  You're not reading wrong but it is listed under bugs.  Which means that the feature doesn't work as intended.

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                  • H
                    Highroller
                    last edited by

                    @dreamslacker:

                    @Highroller:

                    This is from the FreeBSD web site: The powerd utility should also power down idle disks and other components
                         besides the CPU.

                    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=powerd#end

                    Am I reading this wrong?

                    You're not reading wrong but it is listed under bugs.  Which means that the feature doesn't work as intended.

                    Thank you for clearing this up. Powerd seems to be working fine. Thanks again for your help.

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                    • P
                      pf123user
                      last edited by

                      I know this has been discussed a bunch in other threads/topics - is it possible to see or graph (something on dashboard) the current power consumption and temp of the CPU? Also simple things like fan speed, etc.

                      I doubt that people will want this as a package but is there a way even to log this and review later?

                      Also - this may be a totally random/OT question but what about monitoring power to the PCI busses? I've been doing a lot of load testing between NICs (for example one quad NIC vs. two dual NICs) for things like buffering capacity, throughput reliability, etc.

                      Any way to monitor CPU and power usage for things like this? I have a power meter plugged between the PSU and the PDU so I have those numbers - would like to know the nuances of internal power consumption.

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                      • J
                        joako
                        last edited by

                        CPU usage is already logged under RRD Graphs > System. Any other info you can get from the system I am sure you can hack RRD or SNMP rather easily to be able to log it.

                        Not sure what system you have that supports logging power usage, but I only see that in high end systems like HP true server grade. When I look on HP support for DL360 G5 & DL360 G7 I don't see BSD listed, so I'm not sure how you would manage to get the needed data without the proper agent. Honestly in that case you might want to run VMWare ESXi if that data is important to you. Now the issue with that is free ESXi won't show more than 1-2 hours of graphs and I don't think it supports SNMP either: so more than likely licensing fees or hacking will be required there. But it sounds like you are in a proper environment, so there are features to gain that should fit in well.

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