Re: enabling powerd on RPi

On 28 Dec 2023, at 13:11, Mike Karels wrote:

> I am looking at enabling powerd by default on the Raspberry Pi 4 and maybe
> others.  There is a bug from 2021 on the subject which has gotten some recent
> discussion, https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=256836.  Also,
> problems come up from time to time about performance problems because people
> don't know to enable powerd.  It makes FreeBSD look much slower than Linux.
>
> The simplest action is to enable powerd by default on the arm64-aarch64-RPI
> images.  This would affect RPi 4 and variants, also RPI 3* and later RPi 2.
> I enabled powerd on an RPi 3B+, and it seems to have no issues; it seems
> to work.  Does anyone know of a disadvantage of enabling powerd on RPI
> images for all targets?  The alternative would be to configure at the first
> boot, although I'm not positive of a definitive way to identify the RPi
> variants.  Maybe just looking for a dev.cpu.0.freq sysctl node would
> suffice.
>
> If no one objects, I will make changes to enable powerd on RPI snapshots
> for 15-current, and we can see what happens.

My change to enable powerd for all 64-bit Raspberry Pi systems using the
arm64-aarch64-RPI image is in https://reviews.freebsd.org/D43296.  There is
also a review that splits RPi4 from RPi3 (etc); it is
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D43141.  Comments welcome.

		Mike