FreeBSD 50% higher power consumption than Debian

[vedran]

I tried the settings of smithi, but I see no change in power consumption on the E130.
Then I tried graphics/drm-kmod kld_list="i915kms"
and the settings from this post, still no change.

I know this thread is several months old, but I am adding this information for people finding it via search (like me).

This GPU is AMD's, which means that it requires either radeonkms or amdgpu DRM kernel module.

Per AMD-GPU-Matrix wiki page, OP's particular GPU (part of Jaguar SoC) requires amdgpu.

FWIW, I have another mini PC with AMD A8-8600B (that is Carrizo APU). I don't have a power meter nor do I have a comparison with Debian at hand, but I can say that, in my case, loading amdgpu dropped both idle and load temperatures considerably (the server is headless and I don't run OpenCL programs on the GPU most of time).

 

[vedran]

Update: I borrowed a power meter to obtain some more concrete data. This power meter is presumably designed for fridges and ovens, so it doesn't have any decimals, only whole numbers, apologies in advance for that.

To provide a bit more context, the machine is HP EliteDesk 705 G2, APU is AMD PRO A8 8600B (code name Carrizo). The APU is made of Excavator (4th gen Bulldozer) CPU and Volcanic Islands (3rd generation Graphics Core Next) GPU. 1st and 2nd gen GCN are supported by both radeonkms and amdgpu drivers, while this is only supported by the second one.

	Idle temperature	Idle power
before kldload amdgpu	38	13
after kldload amdgpu	29	7

Hope this helps.