On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Phillip Wagstrom -- Area Technical
Engineer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Jürgen Keil wrote:
>>>
>>> I noticed a similar issue on my Tecra M5 when going from builds 109 to
>>> builds 110 and 111.  powertop would say that the cpu would be running at
>>> 1GHz but kstat would stay it was still at 1830000000
>>> I stumbled upon an internal Solaris Nevada bug (CR# 6818514) that was
>>> created for ATOM processors showing the same thing that suggests using:
>>>
>>> cpupm enable poll-mode
>>>
>>> Setting this on my M5 seems to cause the CPU to cycle down as expected.
>>
>> Hmm, my ASUS N4L-VM DH Core2Duo box shows the same.
>>
>> Seems to be a feature (or a bug?) of the new
>> "Power Aware Dispatcher" (PAD) support that
>> was added in build 110.
>>
>>    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tesla/Work/CPUPM/
>>
>> Maybe with the new PAD support (cpupm enabled in
>> "event-mode") the kernel is able to switch back to the
>> highest cpu frequency *much* faster (=> event driven),
>> so that "kstat cpu_info:::current_clock_Hz" now always
>> reports the highest cpu frequency?
>>
>> (That is, monitoring the kstat cpu_info
>> current_clock_Hz isn't valid any more to find out
>> if cpu power management is working -- use powertop
>> instead)
>
>        I wasn't aware of PAD.  Looking at powertop, I did see that the CPU
> frequency was switching there, though it was always at the max according to
> kstat (even when sitting completely idle).  What you suggest could very well
> be the case.
>        I just happened to notice it since my laptops fan was running more
> often.  I guess that I'll have to monitor how long the battery lasts between
> the different modes.
>
> -Phil
>

Frequency transition now occurs during the thread switching if the
cmt_utilization
of the power active domain think it's necessary. It's(event-mode) much
more sensitive
than before(poll-mode), even "kstat | grep current_clock_Hz" is
possible to trigger a
frequency transition. So, now, powertop is more reliable to report the
cpu frequency
utilization.

Thanks,
-Aubrey
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