Power saving?
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I'm looking at trying to enable powerd on my x86 based pfSense box, and wondered if it would be possible to have cpufreq added (as a module I suspect) to the pfSense kernel, along with the powerd binary. A quick test on a VMWare image suggests that, with ACPI enabled, this works (cpufreq.ko copied from the developer ISO and powerd copied from another FreeBSD 6.2 host).
I'm having a look at this myself, but given that I've never done any pfSense development before, I thought it would be quicker to put in a plea here :)
The reason I'm wanting this is that I've got a passively cooled 1.2 GHz box (FX5620) that spends most of it's time idle (<15%), but hot. I'd rather like to reduce the processor speed, when it is idle, so that it runs a bit cooler.
TIA
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I have included both powerd and cpufreq module going forward. It will appear in snapshots later today.
I would suggest a /usr/local/etc.rc/powerd.sh script as follows:
kldload cpufreq
powerd &Be sure to chmod a+rx /usr/local/etc/rc.d/powerd.sh after creating. Also, the .sh is absolutely needed for pfSense startup scripts to source the file correctly on bootup.
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<blink>Darn that was quick - thanks!</blink>
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And, typically, while it works in the VM it turns out that the FX5620 isn't supported by FreeBSD's implementation of ACPI:
ath_hal: 0.9.17.2 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
ACPI-0159: *** Error: AcpiLoadTables: Could not get RSDP, AE_NO_ACPI_TABLES
ACPI-0213: *** Error: AcpiLoadTables: Could not load tables: AE_NO_ACPI_TABLES
ACPI: table load failed: AE_NO_ACPI_TABLESAh well, it was worth a go - I guess it'll just have to stay toasty :)