cpufreq: intel_pstate: Allow raw energy performance preference value

Currently using attribute "energy_performance_preference", user space can
write one of the four per-defined preference string. These preference
strings gets mapped to a hard-coded Energy-Performance Preference (EPP) or
Energy-Performance Bias (EPB) knob.

These four values are supposed to cover broad spectrum of use cases, but
are not uniformly distributed in the range. There are number of cases,
where this is not enough. For example:

Suppose user wants more performance when connected to AC. Instead of using
default "balance performance", the "performance" setting can be used. This
changes EPP value from 0x80 to 0x00. But setting EPP to 0, results in
electrical and thermal issues on some platforms. This results in
aggressive throttling, which causes a drop in performance. But some value
between 0x80 and 0x00 results in better performance. But that value can't
be fixed as the power curve is not linear. In some cases just changing EPP
from 0x80 to 0x75 is enough to get significant performance gain.

Similarly on battery the default "balance_performance" mode can be
aggressive in power consumption. But picking up the next choice
"balance power" results in too much loss of performance, which results in
bad user experience in use cases like "Google Hangout". It was observed
that some value between these two EPP is optimal.

This change allows fine grain EPP tuning for platform like Chromebook or
for users who wants to fine tune power and performance.
Here based on the product and use cases, different EPP values can be set.
This change is similar to the change done for:
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/power/energy_perf_bias
where user has choice to write a predefined string or raw value.

The change itself is trivial. When user preference doesn't match
predefined string preferences and value is an unsigned integer and in
range, use that value for EPP. When the EPP feature is not present
writing raw value is not supported.

Suggested-by: Len Brown <lenb@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Srinivas Pandruvada <srinivas.pandruvada@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_pstate.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_pstate.rst
index 25e1097fc332..40d481cca368 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_pstate.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/pm/intel_pstate.rst
@@ -565,7 +565,11 @@ somewhere between the two extremes:
 Strings written to the ``energy_performance_preference`` attribute are
 internally translated to integer values written to the processor's
 Energy-Performance Preference (EPP) knob (if supported) or its
-Energy-Performance Bias (EPB) knob.
+Energy-Performance Bias (EPB) knob. It is also possible to write a positive
+integer value between 0 to 255, if the EPP feature is present. If the EPP
+feature is not present, writing integer value to this attribute is not
+supported. In this case, user can use
+ "/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/power/energy_perf_bias" interface.
 
 [Note that tasks may by migrated from one CPU to another by the scheduler's
 load-balancing algorithm and if different energy vs performance hints are