Solved Raspberry Pi 1B+ overclocking settings not applied

P

pr1v4teer

I used to have Arch Linux on my old Raspberry Pi 1B+ SBC, but since ALArm project ditched native armv6 support, I decided to switch to FreeBSD as still having one (and dive into the *BSD waters as a new experience). I have installed FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE on a USB drive, and everything got up and running (yet significantly slower compared to Arch Linux for any reason). Then, after literal DAYS of waiting for the needed ports to get compiled (dependency hell at its most shine), I decided to overclock RPi to have it run at least slightly faster. This is trivially done via editing the /boot/msdos/config.txt adding:
Code: 
arm_freq=1000
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=600
over_voltage=6
Yet as I got the RPi rebooted and started a port installation (and CPU load going up to 100 %), I saw the default (not-OCed) 700 MHz CPU freq in htop, never going more than that. dmesg got me
Code: 
bcm2835_cpufreq0: ARM 700MHz, Core 250MHz, SDRAM 400MHz, Turbo OFF
as the last cpufreq message. And there is no vcgencmd in FreeBSD to check the current system settings.
Please advice how to make those settings applied.
 
Before randomly plugging in frequency numbers you should see what is actually available to you.

sysctl -a | grep freq

This gives you a wealth of related information. Important are acceptable values:
Here is Pi3 example.
Code: 
dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1200/-1 600/-1
So you can force Pi3 on FreeBSD 12.3 to either 600mhz or 1200mhz.
 
Thank you, yet the proposed solution is not very flexible. I have eventually got it working as expected with powerd system service turned on, adding to /etc/rc.conf the following lines:
Code: 
powerd_enable="YES"
powerd_flags="-a hiadaptive"
and starting the service with service powerd start (or simply rebooting the system). The "hiadaptive" flag is documented to be applied by default (unless the device has a battery), but I prefer setting options explicitly.
This solution was actually lying on the surface as it is mentioned in the official manual, but I've come from the Linux world where cpufreq governors are mostly enabled by default, so... RTFM. Will mark the thread as 'Solved".
 
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