freebsd stable - Nov 2005 - Performance problem since updating from 6.0-RELEASE to 6.0-STABLE last friday

Last friday I did a cvsup 
src/buildworld/buildkernel/installkernel/installworld/mergemaster on my 
laptop from 6.0-RELEASE to 6.0-STABLE and since the performance of my 
laptop (Dell Precision M70 with a Pentium M 2GHz) is not good. It 
behaves like if the bus was saturated. I noticed that sound skips when I 
play a mp3 with xmms and it also skips when I play dvds (with mplayer, 
ogle or vlc). I have tried to recompile a kernel with apic disabled 
since I had some performance issues with this enabled before 6.0-stable, 
but it didn't fix anything. Does somebody have an idea of what change in 
the FreeBSD sources could be causing this?

Thanks!

Pierre-Luc Drouin

I wanted also to add that my mouse pointer hangs on X since the upgrade. 
So the computer behaves as if it was under heavy load even if the CPU 
usage is almost 0%

Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
> Last friday I did a cvsup 
> src/buildworld/buildkernel/installkernel/installworld/mergemaster on 
> my laptop from 6.0-RELEASE to 6.0-STABLE and since the performance of 
> my laptop (Dell Precision M70 with a Pentium M 2GHz) is not good. It 
> behaves like if the bus was saturated. I noticed that sound skips when 
> I play a mp3 with xmms and it also skips when I play dvds (with 
> mplayer, ogle or vlc). I have tried to recompile a kernel with apic 
> disabled since I had some performance issues with this enabled before 
> 6.0-stable, but it didn't fix anything. Does somebody have an idea of 
> what change in the FreeBSD sources could be causing this?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Pierre-Luc Drouin
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
>

Hi.

On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 12:40:53PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin
wrote:
> I wanted also to add that my mouse pointer hangs on X since the upgrade. 
> So the computer behaves as if it was under heavy load even if the CPU 
> usage is almost 0%
cpufreq/powerd? Did you check, your laptop runs at reasonable speed?

- Olli

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Oliver Brandmueller wrote:
>Hi.
>
>On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 12:40:53PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
>  
>
>>I wanted also to add that my mouse pointer hangs on X since the upgrade.
>>So the computer behaves as if it was under heavy load even if the CPU 
>>usage is almost 0%
>>    
>>
>
>cpufreq/powerd? Did you check, your laptop runs at reasonable speed?
>
>- Olli
>
>  
>
I am using the highest frequency all the time
dev.cpu.0.freq: 1997

On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 02:35:23PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin
wrote:
> Oliver Brandmueller wrote:
> 
> >Hi.
> >
> >On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 12:40:53PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>I wanted also to add that my mouse pointer hangs on X since the
upgrade.
> >>So the computer behaves as if it was under heavy load even if the
CPU
> >>usage is almost 0%
> >>   
> >>
> >
> >cpufreq/powerd? Did you check, your laptop runs at reasonable speed?
> >
> >- Olli
> >
> > 
> >
> I am using the highest frequency all the time
> dev.cpu.0.freq: 1997
Check for high interrupt rates with vmstat -i.

Kris
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Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
> Last friday I did a cvsup
src/buildworld/buildkernel/installkernel/installworld/mergemaster
> on my laptop from 6.0-RELEASE to 6.0-STABLE and since the performance of my
laptop (Dell
> Precision M70 with a Pentium M 2GHz) is not good. It behaves like if the
bus was saturated.
> I noticed that sound skips when I play a mp3 with xmms and it also skips
when I play dvds
> (with mplayer, ogle or vlc). I have tried to recompile a kernel with apic
disabled since I
> had some performance issues with this enabled before 6.0-stable, but it
didn't fix
> anything. Does somebody have an idea of what change in the FreeBSD sources
could be causing
> this?
/me too, and I switched back to 6.0-RELEASE because of that. The problem
is the smart battery support that was merged shortly after 6.0-RELEASE.
Running wmbsdbatt the system freezes for 0.5s every 10s or so, this is
because wmbsdbatt is polling for the battery status. Disabling wmbsdbatt
everything was back to normal.

This can also be reproduced here with a acpiconf -i loop.

Other sources say, it's the thermal stuff thats blocking the OS, but for
me it's battery status. (Dell Inspiron 8600c, Pentium-M)

Ulrich Spoerlein
-- 
 PGP Key ID: F0DB9F44				Encrypted mail welcome!
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Ok, which part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl fhtagn."
didn't you understand?
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Kris Kennaway wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 12:40:36PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Yep, smart battery is definately the problem. The performance of my 
>>laptop is back to normal when I remove the xfce4-battery-plugin. 
>>acpiconf -i loop reproduces the problem for me too. So it looks like 
>>there is something wrong in smart battery.
>>    
>>
>
>Glad to hear you tracked it down.  Please file a PR so this bug can be
>tracked.
>
>Kris
>  
>
Done

Hajimu UMEMOTO wrote:
>Hi,
>
>  
>
>>>>>>On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 11:24:16 -0500
>>>>>>Pierre-Luc Drouin <pldrouin@pldrouin.net> said:
>>>>>>            
>>>>>>
>
>  
>
>>Ok, there is new development. I realized by playing with 
>>debug.acpi.disabled="smbat", debug.acpi.disabled="smbat
cmbat" and
>>debug.acpi.disabled="cmbat", that my laptop battery is not a
smbat,
>>but a cmbat. When I played with hw.acpi.battery.info_expire after to 
>>have applied the patch for acpi_smbat.c, it was freezing less often 
>>because that sysctl variable was shared by both cmbat and smbat. So I 
>>can only get battery status from cmbat (disabling cmbat disables the 
>>use of acpiconf -i loop). To get the status of my battery via cmbat 
>>was working fine up to 6.0-RELEASE (included), but makes my laptop to 
>>freeze since I upgraded to 6.0-stable with Nov 10th sources. What 
>>change related to cmbat between 6.0-release and 6.0-stable could be 
>>causing this?
>>    
>>
>
>pldrouin> Has someone found how to fix this problem in -stable?
>
>Perhaps, I found the cause.  acpi_cmbat_get_bif() is heavy process,
>and it was called only when ACPIIO_CMBAT_GET_BIF ioctl was issued
>explicitly, until smbat stuff was committed.  However,
>acpiio_cmbat_get_bif() is called from every
>acpi_battery_get_battinfo() call, now.
>The attached patch will bring back to former behavior.  Please try it
>and let me know the result.
>It is against 7-CURRENT as of today.  If you want to try it on
>6-STABLE, you need to apply following diff before applying it:
>
>  
>
Wonderful! It fixes it!! I applied both patches and everything seams to 
be working fine now!