I am using an appliance with an Intel Core i7-10810U CPU (6 cores / 12 threads) , due to the device running 24x7, I am trying to reduce power consumption as much as possible, with the latest OPNsense with a fresh installation with mostly defaults, it consumes ~13 watts, if I apply the following Tunables:
hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest = C3
dev.hwpstate_intel.0.epp = 100
...
dev.hwpstate_intel.11.epp = 100
The power consumption gets reduced to ~11.5 watts (12% reduction).
In one of my testings, I installed Proxmox, who runs Linux kernel 6.8.5, and idle with two VMs (Debian and Fedora) running idle as well, uses ~8 watts (30% reduction), that means there are opportunities to tune the FreeBSD kernel and OPNsense even more.
Do you know other tweaks or places I can research to reduce OPNsense power consumption to levels similar to the Linux kernel? Thank you
NOTE: Don't tell me to run OPNsense as a VM within Proxmox, because I know I can do it, but my goal is to run OPNsense on bare metal, if possible.
Hi, I also experienced this difference: virtualized OPNsense consumes about 6w, bare metal OPN consumes about 8w.
The hardware system to virtualize OPNsense or use it bare metal was the same fanless mini pc (i5-5200u, 8GB ram).
The greatest efficiency I currently found using powerD "Minimum", the frequency is almost always "fixed" at 500mhz and the temperatures at 39°C (vs 44°C with other settings, 55°C under load); however, this system decreases the system performance by halving the speeds (from 1000Mbps symmetric to about 500Mbps symmetric).
This CPU is very power efficient as it has Configurable TDP-down Base Frequency 600 MHz and Configurable TDP-down 7.5 W (from intel spec).