Hey guys. First of all it's nice to be here. I had some previous experience with BSD's, I decided to give OpenBSD a go and I'm not one bit dissapointed. I installed 4.4 a few days ago( had not known at the time that the next will be released the second day ). Was surprised to see that cpu scaling worked out of the box. That was not the case with any Linux I ever used, or with FreeBSD. Xorg -configure actually worked and I had a working window manager in 1 minute.
Problems: 1. I set apmd_flags to "-C" in rc.conf, rebooted and automatic scaling worked. then I decided to upgrade to 4.5. I copied all the sets off the 4.5 cd to /sets, booted the 4.5 bsd.rd, started updating from disc, mounted /sets...it all worked ok...or so it seemed. Without any other change I booted to 4.5, just to see my cpu was at full capacity when idling in the console (1.800 MHz). `sysctl hw` shows all the scaling stuff, and I can use `sysctl hw.setperf=0` to get it to 800MHz (minimum and cool), but apmd does not do it automatically. So for now I have it with "-L" (manual mode) but I'd like apmd to do this automatically. I should point out that I disabled apm in the kernel and left acpi enabled (apm would crash on boot if enabled..this was a problem with everything I used before..it's my laptop's fault). But I did the same for 4.4 too and it worked...so something went wrong with the update. After some advice, I just updated to the latest snapshot, which should contain all the patches, including number 003 from the 4.5 erata which I was told could have an impact on my problem. Well it didn't. I have the same problem. 2. X is rather slow (even when I go up to 1.800MHz). Used radeon and radeonhd and same thing (radeonhd is a bit faster though...). Tried enabling XXA, EXA, no xorg.conf at all, tried different things but same problems. Is this a problem for everyone else? As I was writing this email, someone on #openbsd suggested I look at `top` too see if apmd actually works, but system is under heavy load thus upscales. He was correct. My cpu interrupt is at 82.9% (which he said is really really bad). If this is correct than it could explain both my problems (slowness and apmd keeping cpu at full). What could be causing this? (I killed X and tried top and it's still up so I'm guessing it's not X). Thanks for your time.
