Rewritten Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Posted For Linux

A new Apple SoC CPUFreq driver has been posted by Asahi Linux's Hector Martin with the CPU frequency scaling driver, of course, being important for achieving optimal performance and power/thermal management.

The new patches posted today are a "complete rewrite" of the earlier Apple SoC CPUFreq driver attempt. This newly rewritten driver is now a standalone CPUFreq driver rather than relying on CPUFreq-DT. This driver also now avoids memory controller performance switching since it didn't ultimately help out much with their earlier experiments.

Some of the advantages of this latest apple-soc-cpufreq driver is supporting fast switching, reporting of the current CPU frequency to user-space, and support for exposing the higher performance states as turbo states.

See the new apple-soc-cpufreq driver patches on the kernel mailing list where they are now undergoing review. Linux already is showing much exciting potential on the Apple M1 when it comes to the CPU side and will be great to see how well it is once everything is mature and mainline. The graphics enablement effort also remains ongoing.