I was poking around on my recently installed FreeBSD system and I noticed a strange message in /var/run/dmesg.boot that said est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized..
That seemed odd, so I looked it up and found some information about what it was. It seems that the system was not set in the BIOS to allow the OS to manage the performance profile. It also led me to look at powerd to enable the performance mode. I enabled the adaptive mode with the following entries in rc.conf:
powerd_enable: YES
powerd_flags: -a adaptive
After a reboot, the est messages were gone. I’m not sure what difference this might make but it seems reasonable for my use-case.