Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 7:14 PM, Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe_at_nsu.ru> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 03:10:22PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > FreeBSD desktop since 3.3 (makes me a newbie!) I really dislike
> pulseaudio
> > and have managed to live without it. Firefox works fine without it.
> > Unfortunately they dropped OSS support a while go, so I now must use
> alsa,
> > but it works well and without the pain of dealing with pulseaudio, a
> > solution in search of a problem it I ever saw one.
>
> PA should just die, of course, just like that kid's other "products".  OSS
> is so nice; it supports all those nifty features like per-application
> mixing
> and stuff, we have a very strong implementation of it (kudos to ariff_at_,
> let
> me remind us all: http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/SOUND_4.TXT.html).
>
> Giving Firerox back its OSS support is my on TODO list, unfortunately I do
> not have any idea when (or if) I can look at it, but that would be a nice
> step in dealsificaion of our Ports Collection.  OSS was, and should remain,
> the standard Unixish sound system API.
>

Wow! That would be great! It's really annoying that some tools won't (not
can't)
do OSS. PA really had no reason to exist, but some people have such
determination
to do their own thing, even if it means throwing out a better solution.
(OK, so the
author did play some unfortunate games with licensing, but that was years
ago.)

> Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting
> > my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup
> is
> > a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and
> set
> > up stuff once. It just works.
>
> Not always, unfortunately.  I also had a working pin override configuration
> in /boot/loader.conf, but after r236750 (major snd_hda driver rewrite) it
> stopped working.  I've reported it and tried to get some support from mav_at_
> but he never replied.  Since then, I have to carry pre-r236750 version of
> snd_hda(4) to have working sound.
>

Is that just in head? Do I have more fun to look forward to?

> Power is an issue and I find the current defaults suck. Read mav's article
> > on the subject on the wiki.
>
> From reading that article, I've only added hw.pci.do_power_nodriver="3" and
> hw.pci.do_power_resume="0" to /boot/loader.conf.  More aggressive settings,
> like cx_lowest="C2", made my laptop very sluggish and unpleasant to
> operate;
> powerd(8) behaves sanely with no tuning, so I wouldn't say that our current
> defaults suck.  The reason why we're behind on the "green" lane is because
> we generally do not pay much attention when it comes to power-saving during
> development of FreeBSD.  (I'd like to be proven wrong.)
>

The key poblem with power, as I have written several times is the
conflation of
TCC or throttling as power management tools. Mix them (they really don't
save power)
with Cx states is often worse than what you are seeing. It canl cause many
systems to
lock up .

Try setting:
powerd_enable="YES"
performance_cx_lowest="Cmax"
economy_cx_lowest="Cmax"
into /etc/rc.conf and putting:
# Disable CPU throttling
hint.p4tcc.0.disabled=1
hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1
into /boot/loader.conf. That should work MUCH better and will really save
power (assuming
that your system supports better than C2 as C2 usually is a pretty minor
power savings.
C3 or higher is usually where things really start to improve.

I've read a paper from SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center) showing that
CX states
are by far and away the most significant power saver and they should cause
only very
trivial and unnoticeable impact on performance. Number two is EST, but that
is almost
always enabled on FreeBSD, so I assume that you have that running already
(or the
AMD equivalent).


> ./danfe
>
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman_at_gmail.com