AMD Prepping Fixes & Enhancements For P-State CPUFreq Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Prepping Fixes & Enhancements For P-State CPUFreq Driver

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Zen 2 and newer processors has been working out well in its roughly two years of being in the mainline Linux kernel. The AMD P-State driver has helped with ensuring modern Ryzen systems are delivering optimal performance and power efficiency. Recently AMD Linux engineers have been working on a few fixes and enhancements to this CPUFreq driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-P-State-Enhancements-11

[mathieu.cossette]

So happy with this news as it affects my laptop ! Nice improvements!

[npwx]

I kind of miss any explanation about when this should be used over f.i. the performance governor. I have 40 servers with Zen2 and Zen4 64 Core CPUs, doing latency sensitive work. Do I chose performance or the P-State driver? Anyone know of some official guidance how to choose, outlining the drawbacks?

[agd5f]

I kind of miss any explanation about when this should be used over f.i. the performance governor. I have 40 servers with Zen2 and Zen4 64 Core CPUs, doing latency sensitive work. Do I chose performance or the P-State driver? Anyone know of some official guidance how to choose, outlining the drawbacks?

You are mixing up the drivers and the governors. There is the cpu freq driver (acpi_cpufreq, amd-pstate, intel-pstate, etc.) which provides the means to request a target performance level for the CPU, and the governor (performance, powersave, ondemand, etc.) which tells the cpu freq driver which performance level to use at any given time.