AMD Posts Patches For Improving Heterogeneous Core Type CPUs On Linux

AMD engineers posted a new set of Linux driver patches on Tuesday that "addresses critical issues and enhances performance settings for CPUs with heterogeneous core types" while using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

AMD has yet more amd_pstate driver patches on the way for the Linux kernel. AMD Linux engineer Perry Yuan explained of the new patches:

"This patchset addresses critical issues and enhances performance settings for CPUs with heterogeneous core types in the AMD pstate driver. Specifically, it resolves problems related to calculating the highest performance and frequency on the latest CPUs with preferred cores. Additionally, the patchset includes documentation improvements in amd-pstate.rst, offering a comprehensive guide covering topics such as recommended reboot requirements during driver switching, debugging procedures for driver loading failures."

The patches help improve the debugging when encountering broken ACPI CPPC tables, making use of a CPU bit for detecting AMD heterogeneous core topology, This AMD heterogeneous core topology is for CPUs that have a mix of say Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores.

This patch series is noted to fix the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS never boosting to max frequency and related problems like amd_pstate not loading on some hardware.