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authorRafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>2019-03-21 23:20:17 +0100
committerRafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>2019-04-07 22:33:42 +0200
commitb9c273babce791cf228fc466577f55056a699f9c (patch)
treeea9f1103024da00c2ee7804984cac36366cd43bc /Documentation/admin-guide
parent5861381d486601430cccf64849bd0a226154bc0d (diff)
PM / arch: x86: MSR_IA32_ENERGY_PERF_BIAS sysfs interface
The Performance and Energy Bias Hint (EPB) is expected to be set by user space through the generic MSR interface, but that interface is not particularly nice and there are security concerns regarding it, so it is not always available. For this reason, add a sysfs interface for reading and updating the EPB, in the form of a new attribute, energy_perf_bias, located under /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu#/power/ for online CPUs that support the EPB feature. Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.com> Acked-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/admin-guide')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_epb.rst27
1 files changed, 27 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_epb.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_epb.rst
index e9cfa7ec5420..d100849edfc4 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_epb.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_epb.rst
@@ -4,3 +4,30 @@ Intel Performance and Energy Bias Hint
.. kernel-doc:: arch/x86/kernel/cpu/intel_epb.c
:doc: overview
+
+Intel Performance and Energy Bias Attribute in ``sysfs``
+========================================================
+
+The Intel Performance and Energy Bias Hint (EPB) value for a given (logical) CPU
+can be checked or updated through a ``sysfs`` attribute (file) under
+:file:`/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu<N>/power/`, where the CPU number ``<N>``
+is allocated at the system initialization time:
+
+``energy_perf_bias``
+ Shows the current EPB value for the CPU in a sliding scale 0 - 15, where
+ a value of 0 corresponds to a hint preference for highest performance
+ and a value of 15 corresponds to the maximum energy savings.
+
+ In order to update the EPB value for the CPU, this attribute can be
+ written to, either with a number in the 0 - 15 sliding scale above, or
+ with one of the strings: "performance", "balance-performance", "normal",
+ "balance-power", "power" that represent values reflected by their
+ meaning.
+
+ This attribute is present for all online CPUs supporting the EPB
+ feature.
+
+Note that while the EPB interface to the processor is defined at the logical CPU
+level, the physical register backing it may be shared by multiple CPUs (for
+example, SMT siblings or cores in one package). For this reason, updating the
+EPB value for one CPU may cause the EPB values for other CPUs to change.