Disable powerd

© 2026 Gregory D. Weber

Activities of July 19, 2025. Published March 18, 2026.

I correct an error that I made when installing FreeBSD: configuring the powerd to run.

When I installed FreeBSD I mistakenly included powerd among the services to start at boot.

I always suspected that power management did not make sense for a shared vCPU—it’s the host computer that has the physical machine and has to control the power.

Sure enough, I see these boot messages on the console:

Starting powerd.
powerd: no cpufreq(4) support -- aborting: No such file or directory
/etc/rc: WARNING: failed to start powerd

To fix this, I edited /etc/rc.conf, changing

powerd_enable="YES"

to

powerd_enable="NO"

and reboot to make sure I didn’t mess up rc.conf. Done.

I suppose I could have just deleted the line enabling powerd, but I haven’t tested that.