News: 0001500479

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux 6.13 To Default To AMD P-State Driver For EPYC 9005 CPUs

([AMD] 5 Hours Ago AMD P-State On EPYC)


It was just earlier this week that [1]AMD posted Linux patches to switch EPYC over to using the AMD P-State driver rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver. This should lead to better power efficiency out-of-the-box and is a change being made just for EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and future server processors. Already it's looking like this change will be introduced for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window.

On Monday the patches were posted so that the AMD EPYC 9005 series processors join the AMD Ryzen (Zen 2 and newer) processors in defaulting to the amd_pstate CPU frequency scaling driver rather than ACPI CPUFreq. For new 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors this should mean even better out-of-the-box power efficiency compared to the ACPI CPUFreq default. Existing AMD EPYC server customers can already switch over to AMD P-State assuming they have ACPI CPPC platform support but only now is AMD comfortable enough making this default change for their very newest server CPUs.

[2]

On Tuesday a pull request was submitted with the latest AMD P-State content for queuing into the Linux power management system's "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.13. AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello wrote on that [3]pull request :

"Update the amd-pstate driver to set the initial scaling frequency policy lower bound to be lowest non-linear frequency. This will have a slight power consumption impact but should lead to increased efficiency.

Also amd-pstate is enabled by default on servers starting with newer AMD Epyc processors.

Add various code cleanups to rename functions and remove redundant calls."

Great seeing no time wasted there in getting this EPYC support by default queued up for amd-pstate so that it will make it into Linux 6.13. The Linux 6.13 merge window will be opening up during the back half of November while the stable kernel won't be launched until February.

I'm still working on some 5th Gen AMD EPYC AMD P-State vs. ACPI CPUFreq benchmarks and should have the numbers published in the coming days for performance and power efficiency.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-P-State-EPYC-Linux-Patches

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=amd_epyc_pstate_lrg

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pm/19b70e8a-7a11-46f6-ab9e-6dfaf315ef95@amd.com/



phoronix

Operation Desert Slash

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- High officials in the US military are planning on putting
the 'Slashdot Effect' to use against Iraq. Pentagon computer experts think
that the Slashdot Effect could topple key Net-connected Iraqi computer
systems. Such a Denial of Service attack could prove instrumental when the
US invades.

One Pentagon official said, "If I had a million dollars for every server that
crashed as a result of being linked on Slashdot, I'd be richer than Bill
Gates. The Slashdot Effect is a very powerful weapon that the US military
wants to tap into."

Rob Malda has been contacted by top military brass. According to anonymous
sources, Malda will play a key part in the so-called "Operation Desert
Slash". Supposedly Malda will post several Slashdot articles with links to
critical Iraqi websites right when the US invasion is set to begin.
Meanwhile, Pentagon operatives will begin a series of Denial of Service
attacks on other key Iraqi computer systems. One source notes, "Since many
Iraqi systems rely on Microsoft software, this task should be relatively
simple."