AMD P-State Preferred Core Support For Linux Spun Up An Eighth Time

While the AMD P-State driver is working quite well for Ryzen systems already with the default on Linux 6.5, one of the additions we are still waiting to land is the AMD "Preferred Core" functionality. An eighth version of those patches were posted on Monday for inching this feature closer to the mainline kernel.

For several months now AMD Linux engineers have been working on Preferred Core support for Linux. AMD CPUs since the Ryzen 3000 series (Zen 2) have had the notion of "preferred cores" that via ACPI CPPC are communicated to the OS and could be shown under Windows with the likes of AMD Ryzen Master. With the work-in-progress AMD P-State driver patches, this preferred cores handling is finally coming to Linux. With this pending code is the ability to have a dynamically maintained core ranking based on workload and platform conditions to be able to help the kernel's scheduler with optimal task placement for higher frequencies/performance and lower voltages in some cases too.

The v8 patches have some additional review sign-offs as well as a few other basic changes. Overall it looks like things are settling down though for the AMD P-State Preferred Core support, giving us hope that it could be potentially mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle. For now thw patches are only floated on the kernel mailing list and not yet queued into the power management "-next" tree. We'll see what happens over the next few weeks. I have been running some AMD Preferred Core benchmarks on a Ryzen 9 7950X3D under Linux and will be sharing those numbers in a few days.