Rants & Ramblings

I went through with the plan described earlier - use one of the SM502's PWMs to generate a 100Hz timer interrupt, change clock speed only in the timer interrupt handler and that way compensate for the effect on the MIPS cycle counter ( as in, we have a global counter that updates every timer interrupt and time counters just measure cycles since the last timer interrupt adjusted for CPU clock ). This has been committed a while ago, along with changes to pkgsrc/sysutil/estd.
The good news - at a lower clock speed the machine gets significantly less hot.
The bad news - the fan will still spin up every now and then, just not as often as it used to.