Re: [PATCH v3] Force cppc_cpufreq to report values in KHz to fix user space reporting

On 18-05-16, 17:41, Al Stone wrote:

When CPPC is being used by ACPI on arm64, user space tools such as
cpupower report CPU frequency values from sysfs that are incorrect.

What the driver was doing was reporting the values given by ACPI tables
in whatever scale was used to provide them.  However, the ACPI spec
defines the CPPC values as unitless abstract numbers.  Internal kernel
structures such as struct perf_cap, in contrast, expect these values
to be in KHz.  When these struct values get reported via sysfs, the
user space tools also assume they are in KHz, causing them to report
incorrect values (for example, reporting a CPU frequency of 1MHz when
it should be 1.8GHz).

While the investigation for a long term fix proceeds (several options
are being explored, some of which may require spec changes or other
much more invasive fixes), this patch forces the values read by CPPC
to be read in KHz, regardless of what they actually represent.

The downside is that this approach has some assumptions:

   (1) It relies on SMBIOS3 being used, *and* that the Max Frequency
   value for a processor is set to a non-zero value.

   (2) It assumes that all processors run at the same speed, or that
   the CPPC values have all been scaled to reflect relative speed.
   This patch retrieves the first CPU Max Frequency from a type 4 DMI
   record that it can find.  This may not be an issue, however, as a
   sampling of DMI data on x86 and arm64 indicates there is often only
   one such record regardless.  Since CPPC is relatively new, it is
   unclear if the ACPI ASL will always be written to reflect any sort
   of relative performance of processors of differing speeds.

   (3) It assumes that performance and frequency both scale linearly.

For arm64 servers, this may be sufficient, but it does rely on
firmware values being set correctly.  Hence, other approaches are
also being considered.

This has been tested on three arm64 servers, with and without DMI, with
and without CPPC support.

Changes for v3:
    -- Added clarifying commentary re short-term vs long-term fix (Alexey
       Klimov)
    -- Added range checking code to ensure proper arithmetic occurs,
       especially no division by zero (Alexey Klimov)

Changes for v2:
    -- Corrected thinko: needed to have DEPENDS on DMI in Kconfig.arm,
       not SELECT DMI (found by build daemon)

Signed-off-by: Al Stone <redacted>
---
 drivers/acpi/cppc_acpi.c    | 96 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
 drivers/cpufreq/Kconfig.arm |  1 +
 2 files changed, 92 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

I can't keep it unread in my Inbox forever and so I am replying here
to mark it read :)

I don't have enough knowledge of this stuff and so I leave it for
Ashwin and Rafael to do it. :)

-- 
viresh