Acpi_perf0: Px transition to 3000 failed

[openletter]

I've installed pfSense to a HDD and after running a little while (including after reboot), I get the following error:

acpi_perf0: Px transition to 3000 failed
acpi_perf0: set freq failed, err 6

This error displays on the monitor every minute or so.

I've done some googling and found various ways to address this, but vastly different methods are being used to "make the error go away," and I'm not entirely sure the condition causing the error gets fixed or the process of logging the error is removed.

This is on a board with a P4 631 3.0 GHz. I've had issues in Ubuntu with the board's BIOS not loading the correct microcode and causing an associated entry in syslog telling me such, but I am able to fix this by installing the intel-microcode package.

Anyway, if someone can at least point me in a direction, that would be great.

I should add that I'm pretty much completely unfamiliar with FreeBSD.

[openletter]

More info:

$ dmesg | grep -i cpu
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz (2992.59-MHz K8-class CPU)
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 2 CPUs
 cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
 cpu1 (AP/HT): APIC ID:  1
cpu0: <acpi cpu=""> on acpi0
cpu1: <acpi cpu=""> on acpi0
acpi_perf0: <acpi cpu="" frequency="" control=""> on cpu0
p4tcc0: <cpu frequency="" thermal="" control=""> on cpu0
est1: <enhanced speedstep="" frequency="" control=""> on cpu1
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr f2700000f27
p4tcc1: <cpu frequency="" thermal="" control=""> on cpu1
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!</cpu></enhanced></cpu></acpi></acpi></acpi>

[openletter]

In a post at the FreeBSD forums, I found a possible solution for updating microcode, but the solution requires:

On FreeBSD 8.0 or later:

# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/devcpu-data
# make install clean

But pfSense does not have /usr/ports/ directory.

The solution also states to set microcode_update_enable="YES" in rc.conf, but pfSense uses config.xml, so I'm not sure if this would work just as well, nor am I sure where to put it.

[stephenw10]

There are no build tools in pfSense for good reason so ports wouldn't be much use anyway. However you can use the FreeBSD package system to install this. I have no idea what it's dependencies might be though, you could potentially end up installing something that breaks pfSense.

Steve

[openletter]

Thanks for the info. Basically, my processor is running at 3.0 GHz and isn't using any kind of speed stepping. However, I'm rather liking pfSense, though it took some time to get rules figured out - still having some minor issues, so I'm treating the P4 build as just a test platform. I'll probably get an Atom board to be the permanent home.

Thanks for the hard work on this project. I've been using DD-WRT almost since it came out, but support for their community versions really went downhill when they began offering professional services, leading me to question how secure the builds are, plus I find the community to be rude and arrogant.

I'm also hoping that pf will do a better job at QoS for VoIP than iptables, that way I don't have to use vendor supplied, rarely if ever upgraded, hardware for my network gateway, which in other configurations doesn't seem to play well with streaming video.