Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ bcm2835-cpufreq: Failed to set clock Errors

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Both my Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ are sending errors to the log regarding the inability to change the CPU frequency. Anybody know of a fix or workaround for this issue?

bcm2835-cpufreq:bcm2835_cpufreq_set_clock:84: Failed to set clock: 1200000 (-12)
bcm2835-cpufreq:bcm2835_cpufreq_driver_target_index:183: Error occurred setting a new frequency (1200000)
cpufreq: __target_index: Failed to change cpu frequency: -22

This set of three lines has occured 44 times in the last 6.5 hours. A bit of googling reveals that this error has been reported before on snapshot builds more than a year ago.

I'm running on 18.06.1 stable.

2

Same problem for me. But still no solution found. :frowning:

3

I have found that this only occurs with many USBs plugged in. I have two USB GSM Sticks. With one in it does not throw this error, with two it does. After throwing this error a number of times the device locks up

4

This only occurs on my Raspberry Pi 3B when the AX88179 based USB-to-Ethernet adapter is active. It doesn't occur if it is just plugged in and not active. Adding or removing other USB devices has no effect. It doesn't seem to cause any issues other than filling the log with errors.

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5

Digging up an old thread to leave a partial solution that may be useful to others, but this is still an active issue for me with Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 running GoldenOrb_2020-05-16 (OpenWrt 18.06.7).

I've seen in other places on Raspberry Pi references that this tends to be tied to something related to USB. For whatever reason, eliminating CPU frequency switching by any of several possible means does solve the problem. You can either set the frequency manually to a single frequency in /boot/config.txt, or (as I've chosen to do) you can change the governor after boot using /etc/rc.local to one of the two governors that only uses a single frequency (either performance or powersave). In my case, I've locked mine to powersave, since my Pi is rarely heavily loaded.

In /etc/rc.local, add the line:
echo powersave > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_governor

Or, of course, use performance if you need full speed.

If you need something in between, it's relatively easy to set a fixed frequency anywhere from 100 to 1200 (on the 3B) in config.txt, as well, and there is ample info on how to do that on the Pi forums (including tons of fairly advanced info in the Advanced users > Overclocking thread, which is 46 pages long and includes participation from one of the main board engineers for the Pi).

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