Skylake CPU MHZ stays maxed…
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Running 2.3 RC (Latest as of today)
I noticed that when looking at the Status->Dashboard->System Information widget, that the CPU MHZ has been fixed at maximum for the processor, even when utilization is 1% or less. Is freebsd/pfsense not able to use the advanced power saving abilities of the CPU, or is the System Information widget not reporting the real speed of the processor?
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You have to enable powerd for that under System>Advacned, Misc.
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PowerD modes:
minimum - uses only the minimum cpu frequency
maximum - uses only the maximum cpu frequency
adaptive - uses from the min. to the max. cpu frequency, but with power saving capabilities
hi adaptive - uses from the min. to the max cpu frequency, but with power saving and more speed oriented -
When I upgraded my Desktop last year. I attempted to move from 4th Gen i7 CPU on Z97 to 6th Gen i7 on Z170 and let me tell you, I ran into all sorts of boot issues related to memory issues and power management problems. SO much that over a 2 week period, I bought and returned 2 Asus z170 + 1 MSI Z170 motherboard, 3 i7-6700k CPU's and 3 kinds of DDR4 memory advertised as Z170 compatible. I finally said screw it and moved to X99.
Not sure if any of this is related but I what I believe to be the issue was that prior to Skylake, Intel allowed all motherboard manufacturers to use the varying IC power chips. With Skylake, the this changed and now they have to use an Intel proprietary chip and all the manufactures struggle to make O.C. capable boards that work with it. I suspect that it may be the a potential cause of your issue.
I suggest, if possible, to not use a Z170 board for this. I personally believe it was released to early and all the bugs were not worked out of it yet. Z77, Z87 and Z97 are all solid chipset that are proven and work amazing well with pfsense. Honestly, outside of hardware features that pfsense can't use, there is no clear cut advantage to using z170 over any other chipset.
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The chipsets themselves should matter for memory compatibility because the chipset has absolutely nothing to do with the memory ever since memory controllers went on the CPU. But you pointed out that the Z170's were earlier and there could be a correlated link between early motherboards with early chipsets and memory not working.
I never buy bleeding edge. Always wait about 6-8 months after a completely new CPU is released and I only get highly reviewed highly rated hardware that doesn't have any patterns in the complaints.
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The advice from cmb solved my issue. I just had to check the box for powerd.
I haven't had any hardware stability trouble with my MB (Gigabyte LGA1151 Intel Z170 Mini-ITX DDR4 Motherboard GA-Z170N-WIFI). I got this motherboard because of its form factor (mini-itx), but also because it was the only Skylake compatible board with two intel nics on board that I could find.
The only trouble I have is driver support with FreeBSD. Wifi isn't recognized, and the intel nics were just recently supported in the 2.3 beta.