Expanded Platform Support For AMD Dynamic Boost Control Being Worked On For Linux

Since early this year AMD has been working on Linux enablement patches for Dynamic Boost Control (DBC). This is a new feature of some AMD SoCs that allow an "authenticated entity" to have greater control over certain SoC characteristics to improve the power/performance. AMD DBC was merged for Linux 6.6 just days ago while already new patches have been posted that extend the supported platforms for this Dynamic Boost Control functionality.

AMD Dynamic Boost Control is interesting for enhancing the power/performance tuning of Ryzen SoCs but its integration around the PSP/CCP for security to ensure "authenticated entities" control it may rub some Linux/open-source enthusiasts the wrong way. Besides a basic sample script for user-space, we haven't yet seen how widespread or robust OEMs/ODMs will leverage this new functionality. There hasn't been much public information yet on this AMD Dynamic Boost Control functionality in general.

While the AMD DBC support was just merged to the mainline Linux kernel days ago, already a new patch series is providing "new" platform support for DBC. This new platform coverage is for unnamed platforms that support this hardware feature via a different mailbox than the platform access mailbox initially enabled as part of the original DBC patches.

The patches don't shed any light on the "new platform" making use of this alternative DBC enablement approach (presumably next-gen SoCs given the lack of details and not making the initial enablement push), but good to see AMD anyhow working on these continued Linux client improvements.