i8000fan for freebsd and Sony PCG-z1wa

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 23:22:30 -0700 (MST)
> From: "M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com>
> 
> In message: <20060219051441.148E345041 at ptavv.es.net>
>             "Kevin Oberman" <oberman at es.net> writes:
> : > Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 21:59:35 -0700 (MST)
> : > From: "M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com>
> : > Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> : > 
> : > In message: <43F7F2FD.9070509 at centtech.com>
> : >             Eric Anderson <anderson at centtech.com> writes:
> : > : M. Warner Losh wrote:
> : > : > Recently, I've had to diagnose problems with my dell i8200 which sadly
> : > : > runs windows.  It was running slower than the dickens.  Turns out it
> : > : > was heat related and the bios was stepping the speed down and never
> : > : > back up.  I've not been able to fix the overheading problem (would
> : > : > love to know how, btw).
> : > : >
> : > : > In the process of all of this, I found a damn useful program that
> : > : > monitored the temperature, fan speed CPU load and CPU speed, producing
> : > : > a nice graph over time.
> : > : >
> : > : > I was wondering if something similar existed for FreeBSD.  I'd like a
> : > : > nice little program that I can use to graph the temperature, CPU speed
> : > : > and cpu load, with and without powerd running.  Can anybody help me out?
> : > : >   
> : > : 
> : > : Are you looking for a long term statistical tool, or a real-time 
> : > : graphical view?  I was thinking perl+rrdtool for a long term background 
> : > : tool that would create png's would be pretty easy to whip up..
> : > 
> : > I was hoping to get a nice real-time graph...
> : 
> : I have not looked at details, but it looks like whipping up a plugin for
> : gkrellm for this would be pretty straight forward. It has all of the
> : basic tools to do what you want. It already monitors environment from
> : ACPI and can monitor temperatures, voltages and fans using mbmon if the
> : information is not available in ACPI.
> 
> How do I get the current speed of the CPU?  The rest I think I can do
> already...  Is it just the dev.cpu.0.freq?  Is there some way I can
> test this value easily to make sure that the OS' idea of the speed and
> the CPU's idea of the speed are the same?
> 
> I've seen a lot of interesting graphs in the windows arena that seem
> like they would help battery life a lot w/o compromising performance
> all that much that I'm thinking would be fun to code up...

There is a plugin for gkrallm that will provide the current clock speed,
gkx86info2. It does NOT report throttling...only actual clock speed
changes. 

dev.cpu.0.freq reports the effective speed which is a combination of
clock speed and throttling.

To get a REALLY slow system, it's far more likely that throttling is
kicking in as its effect on performance is dar greater than the reduced
clock. Pre-Pentium-M, CPUs only supported 2 clock speeds, normally full
speed and 2/3 speed. But throttling could reduce the effective speed to
12.5% of the clock speed which can be a real pool of molasses.

dev.cpu.0.freq will reflect the effect of thermal management, so will
let you know if the system is slowing because it is too hot (or thinks
it is). hw.acpi.thermal will tell you where thermal management takes
over (_PSV).
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634