PowerNow in mobile AthlonXP

[Scott Lambert]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 10:06:15AM +0000, Simon Dick wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 00:01, Bruno Ducrot wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 01:05:57PM -0500, Scott Lambert wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 09:17:11AM +0100, antic_eye wrote:
> > > > Hi there,
> > > > 
> > > > I googled all the web for a solution, so I hope you could help me. I
> > > > have a PackardBell Laptop with a mobile athlon xp inside. I installed
> > > > FreeBSD 5.2.1 3 weeks ago and everything works fine. Even the screen
> > > > flickering under x I fixed (it lasts me one week :o)).
> > > > 
> > > > My problem is, that I dont know how to trottle the cpu frequency. Linux
> > > > has the cpufreqd. Is there anything appropriate in BSD? ACPI is up and
> > > > running (expect the StandBy mode - it doesn't work)
> > > 
> > > I think Nate Lawson is working on getting a generic CPU frequency
> > > maniplation system added.  My athlon laptop also runs full speed all the
> > > time and has no throttle options in the acpi sysctls.
> > > 
> > > hw.acpi.cpu.cx_supported: C1/0
> > > hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: 0
> > > hw.acpi.cpu.cx_history: 42619368/0
> > > 
> > 
> > That strange.  I would expect that your laptop will support at least C2
> > since without it a laptop based on Athlon is somewhat overheaten.
> 
> My XP2400+ laptop does show C2:
> simond at laptop:~$ sysctl hw.acpi.cpu
> hw.acpi.cpu.cx_supported: C1/0 C2/90
> hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: 0
> hw.acpi.cpu.cx_history: 62780232/0 0/0

My DSDT may be messed up.  However, thanks to Bruno, I now have the
ability to set my processor speed to six different levels without going
through ACPI.  This has significantly cooled my lap, reduced local noise
pollution, and enhanced battery run times.

14:19:41 Wed Mar 17 $ sysctl hw.powernow
hw.powernow.frequency: 532000
hw.powernow.voltage: 1200
hw.powernow.max_states: 6
hw.powernow.state: 5
hw.powernow.table: 
fsb 133MHz latency 100.000us
  0  1862000kHz  FID 16 (14.0)  VID 0b (1450mV)
  1  1463000kHz  FID 00 (11.0)  VID 0d (1350mV)
  2  1064000kHz  FID 0a ( 8.0)  VID 13 (1200mV)
  3   798000kHz  FID 06 ( 6.0)  VID 13 (1200mV)
  4   665000kHz  FID 04 ( 5.0)  VID 13 (1200mV)
  5   532000kHz  FID 12 ( 4.0)  VID 13 (1200mV)

-- 
Scott Lambert                    KC5MLE                       Unix SysAdmin
lambert at lambertfam.org       http://www.lambertfam.org/~lambert/resume.html