Dynamic Frequency Selection

OCTEON CN9130
1

Note: not referring here to the MPP pin sampled by hardware at reset; this is about a divide down of system clock under software control.

I’m looking into Linux “dynamic frequency selection”:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-freq/

The Marvell Armada CN9130 Functional Specifications document has this term, suggesting the feature exists. The kernel has _/drivers/cpufreq/armada-8k-cpufreq.c and armada-37xx-cpufreq.c, but I’m not currently clear if either of these apply to this processor. I don’t see any setup for this in existing device tree files; by _/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/opp/oop-v1.yaml, I would expect something which defines “operating-points” for example.

Question: what is the state of this feature for CN9130? Perhaps one of these …

  • Not applicable for this processor
  • The feature exists in hardware but no Linux driver currently available
  • A driver in the mainline kernel can be used, if the device tree were edited to trigger it, and additional content for the device tree could be found at https://----
  • A working driver exists someplace else

Hints welcomed, thanks.

2

This is currently not in mainline, but you can find the patch to enable clock scaling via the armada-8k driver in our patches here. cn913x_build/0013-cpufreq-armada-enable-ap807-cpu-clk.patch at master · SolidRun/cn913x_build · GitHub

3

Since yesterday an update with a newer kernel landed with https://github.com/SolidRun/cn913x_build/commit/8a00da5c65ea3078c03308de904da7bebf76d203, I built a new set of images to try and see what impact working cpufreq had.

Switching between ondemand and performance scaling governors showed only a difference of 0.05W in Idle.
But with debian upstream kernels, the devices would regularly run into thermal shutdown after 15-20 minutes, whereas now the CPU seems to occasionally throttle at 85°C and keep the system running.