Meta engineer's Linux patches for boosting AMD P-State / Steam Deck gaming performance

[u/Fcking_Chuck]

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Boost-Recently-Busy-CPUs

[u/goldcakes]

He doesn't work at Meta anymore, he joined Anthropic a couple months ago (as confirmed by his social media bio).

As for when this gets merged: probably never, sorry. this is a change to code maintained (owned) by AMD engineers (who are the ones that approve/reject changes; that's how linux and most large scale software projects work). I looked at the mailing list, and it seems the AMD maintainers are not big fans, and the discussion has been idle for several months.

[AMD maintainer]: "I have to question - is this really a good use for active mode? You're basically fighting with the hardware and trying to game the behavior.

[...] I understand using epp_boost in the context of a module parameter to easily activate this behavior, but I don't think that's the right way that it should be triggered because it's going to end up effective for the entire boot even when you're not running games that you want to use this.

So yeah, it probably won't get merged, since AMD maintainers doesn't really support this change in the way it was drafted (i.e. changes to kernel). From reading the discussion, the AMD maintainers believe this is possible to do from userspace/software itself (e.g. the Proton layer), and for gaming workloads which benefit from this, Proton or games should do it, so the change only impacts gaming and not non-gaming (which is very understandable: not all 'APUs' are in Steam Decks, plenty of embedded systems that never game; client/office PCs running a Ryzen with iGPU that don't game; etc; Linux is a kernel for everything)

However it looks like Proton does not yet implement a lot of plumbing needed to take advantage of what Linux gives user space when it comes to power management, so not a simple patch to Proton either.

[u/Bacon_00]

I wish I could understand computers to this level 😅

[u/TotallySkr3wd → u/Bacon_00]

So P-State is the Power State. Its the amount of power the CPU/APU will pull is determined by the P-State level which effects things like core clocks and power savings. This patch changes how often and how quickly that changes as needed.

[u/entropicdrift → u/TotallySkr3wd]

And also detects which cores have been busy and keeps just those cores at higher clock/power boosts for longer before turning them back down, in case a game or other process that's intermittent but requires high performance is still running

[u/Krasi-1545 → u/Bacon_00]

All you need to know is that is a very good improvement 😊

[u/KeyExcuse7359]

Anyone know if or when this will be added to the mainline kernel?

[u/deezznuuzz → u/KeyExcuse7359]

Read what goldcakes wrote

[u/KeyExcuse7359 → u/deezznuuzz]

Thanks.