POWER On-Chip Controller Driver Coming For Linux 4.21

The IBM POWER On-Chip Controller (OCC) driver is queued for inclusion in the next version of the Linux kernel. This on-chip controller driver collects sensor data from the system and processor, including temperature and power metrics, and exposes that to the user as well as handling thermal/power management tasks.

The on-chip controller is embedded into POWER processors with P8/P9 processors. The newly-queued OCC driver exposes via sysfs temperatures, frequencies, power usage, power capacity/minimum/maximums, and other sensor data. The OCC driver documentation covers the information in more detail.

The POWER OCC code is currently queued in hwmon-next for introduction in the next cycle that will be Linux 4.21 unless Linus Torvalds decides to rename that next kernel release to Linux 5.0.