This interface is mainly intended (and implemented) for ACPI _PPC BIOS
frequency limitations, but other cpufreq drivers can also use it for
similar use-cases.
Why is this needed:
Currently it's not obvious why cpufreq got limited.
People see cpufreq/scaling_max_freq reduced, but this could have
happened by:
- any userspace prog writing to scaling_max_freq
- thermal limitations
- hardware (_PPC in ACPI case) limitiations
Therefore export bios_limit (in kHz) to:
- Point the user that it's the BIOS (broken or intended) which limits
frequency
- Export it as a sysfs interface for userspace progs.
While this was a rarely used feature on laptops, there will appear
more and more server implemenations providing "Green IT" features like
allowing the service processor to limit the frequency. People want
to know about HW/BIOS frequency limitations.
All ACPI P-state driven cpufreq drivers are covered with this patch:
- powernow-k8
- powernow-k7
- acpi-cpufreq
Tested with a patched DSDT which limits the first two cores (_PPC returns 1)
via _PPC, exposed by bios_limit:
# echo 2200000 >cpu2/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
# cat cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
2600000
2600000
2200000
2200000
# #scaling_max_freq shows general user/thermal/BIOS limitations
# cat cpu*/cpufreq/bios_limit
2600000
2600000
28000002800000
# #bios_limit only shows the HW/BIOS limitation
CC: Pallipadi Venkatesh <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com>
CC: Len Brown <lenb@kernel.org>
CC: davej@codemonkey.org.uk
CC: linux@dominikbrodowski.net
Signed-off-by: Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
I think the way "cpuinfo_cur_info" and "scaling_cur_info" are defined under
./Documentation/cpu-freq/user-guide.txt can be enhanced. Currently, they are
both defined the same way: "Current speed/frequency" of the CPU, in KHz".
Below is a patch that distinguishes one from the other.
Regards,
- naga -
-----------------------------------------
Update description for "cpuinfo_cur_freq" and "scaling_cur_freq".
Some of the wording is drawn from comments found in
./drivers/cpufreq/cpufreq.c: cpufreq_out_of_sync():
* @old_freq: CPU frequency the kernel thinks the CPU runs at
* @new_freq: CPU frequency the CPU actually runs at
Signed-off-by: Naga Chumbalkar <nagananda.chumbalkar@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
I have been reading the documentation for cpufreq closely. Found a couple of
minor errors in the Documentation.
Signed-off-by: Naga Chumbalkar <nagananda.chumbalkar@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
It's not only useful for the ondemand and conservative governors, but
also for userspace daemons to know about the HW transition latency of
the CPU.
It is especially useful for userspace to know about this value when
the ondemand or conservative governors are run. The sampling rate
control value depends on it and for userspace being able to set sane
tuning values there it has to know about the transition latency.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
They were long enough set deprecated...
Update Documentation/cpu-freq/users-guide.txt:
The deprecated files listed there seen not to exist for some time anymore
already.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Renninger <trenn@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>
The sh cpufreq driver is no longer limited to just the SH-3 and SH-4,
update the documentation to reflect this fact accordingly.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
There is a description of some of the sysfs files. However, there are some
that are not mentioned in the documentation, so add them to the user's guide.
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Venkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
There have been patches hanging around for ages to add support for
cpufreq to PXA255 processors. It's about time we applied one.
Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
I just stumbled on this bug/feature, this is how to reproduce it:
# echo 450000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq
# echo 450000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
# echo powersave > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
# cpufreq-info -p
450000 450000 powersave
# echo 1800000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq ; echo $?
0
# cpufreq-info -p
450000 450000 powersave
Here it is. The kernel refuses to set a min_freq higher than the
max_freq but it allows a max_freq lower than min_freq (lowering min_freq
also).
This behaviour is pretty straightforward (but undocumented) and it
doesn't return an error altough failing to accomplish the requested
action (set min_freq).
The problem (IMO) is basically that userspace is not allowed to set a
full policy atomically while the kernel always does that thus it must
enforce an ordering on operations.
The attached patch returns -EINVAL if trying to increase frequencies
starting from scaling_min_freq and documents the correct ordering of writes.
Signed-off-by: Mattia Dongili <malattia@linux.it>
Signed-off-by: Dominik Brodowski <linux at dominikbrodowski.net>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
--
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Thomas Renninger
Naga Chumbalkar
Paul Mundt
Robin Getz
Darrick J. Wong
Russell King
Mattia Dongili
Linus Torvalds