Turbostat For Linux 5.13 Brings AMD Zen Fix, New Intel CPU Support

The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting on CPU topology and various power/frequency metrics has some useful additions pending for the Linux 5.13 kernel.

With Turbostat's development being led by Intel and their significant engineering resources, it's no surprise they are always punctual in their new enablement support. With Linux 5.13 the Turbostat tool adds support for Alder Lake mobile processors as well as Ice Lake D. There are also fixes/tweaks to existing CPU support.

While Intel focused, Turbostat does support modern AMD CPUs still as well. With this 5.13 pull request comes a fix for AMD Family 17h "Zen" support. RADV driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen discovered that Turbostat began exiting on his system. He noticed this Turbostat exiting problem stemmed from reading an MSR failing. Bas added support for using MSR_PKG_ENERGY_STAT as an alternative to the MSR_PKG_ENERGY_STATUS to correct this problem for fixing Turbostat usage on AMD Zen processors.

Turbostat in the Linux 5.13 source tree is also adding a built-in counter for instructions per cycle (IPC) calculation, CPU microcode patch level is now being printed by the tool, TCC offset support is introduced, and a variety of fixes.

More details on the Turbostat changes via this pull request.