i7 9700 (presumed) CPU issues resolved with 22.1

[iMx]

Just adding this here, for anyone in a similar situation...

Was previously running a Qotom J1900 for the last 7+ years, happily on 21.7.  Recently upgraded the firewall, now with an i7 9700 CPU.

Upgrade was easy enough, export the config, edit the interface names for the new device in the export file, import into the new box.  Initially started out with 21.7 on the new box.

But, whilst using PowerD with the J1900 was not a problem, with the i7 9700 it caused it to crash usually under a reasonably small amount of load - on 21.7 - fans would go to 100% and required physically power cycling. 

Turning off PowerD resolved the issue, but the CPU frequency (dev.cpu.0.freq) would always be at 1400 - even using 'stress' the CPU would seemingly not scale.

Upgrading to 22.1 which I believe uses hwpstate_intel instead for power management, resolves the issue. 

dev.cpu.x.freq when running stress shows it is also using up to the 'Turbo Boost' frequency '4497', so the CPU can work at maximum when required and drop back down (dev.cpu.0.freq: 897). 

Performance vs power can be tuned with dev.hwpstate_intel.*.epp

I did come across a FreeBSD post, where they were essentially saying it was legacy and should probably be removed - so I haven't attempted PowerD again, but will for testing again at some point.  So it seems 'ok' for older CPUs, but for more modern CPUs PState seems to be the way to go.

[franco]

Thank you for this information

I agree that powerd is somewhat arcane these days but I doubt it will be removed in the mid-term in FreeBSD.


Cheers,
Franco