Zhaoxin Preparing Preferred Core Support For Their CPUs On Linux

Similar to Intel and AMD processors with not all cores necessarily being created equal, Zhaoxin engineers are working on plumbing preferred core support for their processors into the Linux kernel.

Zhaoxin CPUs can also support the notion of preferred cores where certain cores may be able to achieve higher frequencies and may have different maximum frequencies. With the proposed Linux kernel patches, Zhaoxin CPUs are using existing ACPI functionality for indicating the per-core differences and the patches are to reflect that within the ACPI CPUFreq driver. With this the scheduler can prefer running tasks on the preferred cores to yield better performance.

See this patch series for the new work posted today by Zhaoxin for the Linux acpi-cpufreq driver. The patches don't elaborate on what Zhaoxin processors currently support preferred cores or if this is only for future products, but in any event it's nice to see them working on the Linux kernel support. Over the past year Zhaoxin has worked a fair amount on their Yongfeng CPU support.