Updated AMD P-State Driver Published For Linux

Earlier this month AMD published their "amd-pstate" Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that "amd-pstate" Linux kernel driver is now available for testing.

AMD did a Sunday morning code drop of their new amd-pstate patch series. The "v2" patch series is largely the same as the original patches from earlier this month but with improved code organization and a few other low-level changes. It doesn't appear that there is any fundamental changes with this patch series to affect the overall performance / power efficiency compared to the prior original patches.

Those interested in testing this new Linux amd-pstate driver can find the series on the kernel mailing list. There is also the amd-pstate-dev-v2 via Git for easier building/testing.

I'll be giving this driver revision a go on some more hardware. My initial amd-pstate vs. acpi-cpufreq testing with a few systems showed that there still is room for improvement compared to ACPI CPUFreq, we'll see what happens with more hardware and if the v2 series does happen to have any impact. It's good in any case to see the amd-pstate driver being revved quickly compared to the original AMD ACPI CPPC driver that stalled out immediately after the v1 patches in 2019.