Distribution: Fedora Core 5 Hardware Environment: Dell PowerEdge 830, Pentium D 930 CPU Software Environment: Totally vanilla distro Problem Description: cpufreq is not working on this machine. Here's what I get when I try to modprobe speedstep-centrino and acpi-cpufreq: cpufreq-core: trying to register driver centrino cpufreq-core: adding CPU 0 speedstep-centrino: speedstep-centrino: obtaining ACPI data failed speedstep-centrino: found unsupported CPU with Enhanced SpeedStep: send /proc/cpuinfo to cpufreq@lists.linux.org.uk cpufreq-core: initialization failed cpufreq-core: adding CPU 1 speedstep-centrino: speedstep-centrino: obtaining ACPI data failed cpufreq-core: initialization failed cpufreq-core: no CPU initialized for driver centrino cpufreq-core: unregistering CPU 0 cpufreq-core: unregistering CPU 1 acpi-cpufreq: acpi_cpufreq_init acpi-cpufreq: acpi_cpufreq_early_init cpufreq-core: trying to register driver acpi-cpufreq cpufreq-core: adding CPU 0 acpi-cpufreq: acpi_cpufreq_cpu_init cpufreq-core: initialization failed cpufreq-core: adding CPU 1 acpi-cpufreq: acpi_cpufreq_cpu_init cpufreq-core: initialization failed cpufreq-core: driver acpi-cpufreq up and running [root@home ~]# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/info processor id: 0 acpi id: 1 bus mastering control: no power management: no throttling control: no limit interface: no
Created attachment 9058 [details] acpidump.out I've attached acpidump output from the affected machine.
Bogus BIOS. It doesn't have anything that defines speedstep. Processor objects that should contain all these details are empty. Scope (\_PR) { Processor (CPU0, 0x01, 0x00000000, 0x00) {} Processor (CPU1, 0x02, 0x00000000, 0x00) {} } Can you check for any BIOS updates? Do you have the other OS installed on this laptop. My guess is that there will be no speedstep support in there as well. But, it wil be interesting to check.
feature missing in BIOS (possibly b/c it is missing on motherboard). Check the specs for the motherboard to see if it advertises support for EIST. If so, check for updated BIOS to support it. The bug here is actually that the driver didn't unload properly when it didn't find the feature...
Thanks, Venkatesh and Len. It looks like by default, the BIOS doesn't export the CPU performance state tables to the OS, but that this may be configurable.
I just want to confirm for you that once I got the BIOS to export the performance tables to the OS, speedstep-centrino now works flawlessly. Thanks. The unload-related portion of this bug presumably remains unresolved, but I'll help you to test a patch whenever you like.
Unload issue is resolved now (as in 2.6.19-rc1). Closing this bug as not a kernel bug.