[RESPONDED] Power-Profiles-Daemon and AMD-PState

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

Hi everyone,

I come to you with a load of questions ! I’ve received my Framework Laptop 13 AMD from batch 10, absolutely loving it so far !

I’ve played a bit with stress-ng (stress-ng -c 16 ) to stress my CPU and I observed the following:

  1. the CPU quickly rise to 100°C, @~4Ghz
  2. the FAN slowly catches up, taking off like a F16
  3. the CPU cool down to ~86°C, @~3,6Ghz

I’ve played a bit while with power-profiles-daemon and I discovered that it does not seem to use the amd_pstate driver.

When I run the command sudo powerprofilesctl it gives me the following:

  balanced:
    Driver:     placeholder

* power-saver:
    Driver:     placeholder

From what I’ve been able to read online, it means that PPD is using a default, low-feature driver named placeholder, since it was not able to use a platform specific driver.
On Debian, PPD’s version is 0.12-1+b1
But the pstate is installed and loaded, asserted by this two commands:

> cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/energy_performance_available_preferences
default performance balance_performance balance_power power
> sudo cpupower frequency-info
analyse du CPU 0 :
  driver: amd-pstate-epp
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency:  Cannot determine or is not supported.
  material limitation : 400 MHz - 5.13 GHz
  available governors : performance powersave
  tactique actuelle : frequency must be between 400 MHz and 5.13 GHz.
                  The powersave governor is free to choose any frequency in this interval.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 1.53 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes
    Boost States: 0
    Total States: 3
    Pstate-P0:  3300MHz
    Pstate-P1:  2200MHz
    Pstate-P2:  1600MHz

To the other FW13 AMD owners, do you have the same output ?
Is this an expected behavior as PPD do not support AMD-PSTATE yet ?

My current setup : Debian 12 with Linux framework 6.5.0-0.deb12.4-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.5.10-1~bpo12+1 (2023-11-23) x86_64 GNU/Linux.

2

Support for this AMD platform has been merged upstream to PPD just a few weeks ago and there is no new tagged version yet.

Have a look at this thread:

3

Specifically support for AMD pstate also with a platform profile has been merged upstream.

It appears you’re missing platform profile support too! This could be a bug in Debian kernel configuration or it could be too old of a version.

I suggest you clone the tree from upstream and test it. If offers both a CPU and a platform profile then there is no kernel problem. I suggest you file a bug requesting them to update to the 0.20 release after it is tagged (which should be soon).

If it’s missing a platform profile after you’ve updated there is bug that Debian kernel is missing CONFIG_AMD_PMF and I suggest you file that with them.

4

Thank you for your reply !

Your diagnosis was right !

I submitted the following bugreport : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1063161

I’ve installed PPD from the Ubuntu PPA and I have at least support for the amd-pstate driver (should have read Framework’s doc for Linux :sweat_smile:).
That is a start !

Thanks again !

5

@Mario_Limonciello

It looks to me like I have a similar problem with the power profile daemon.
I am using Silverblue 39, which should actually be up to date (Framework 16 without dGPU).

From powerprofilesctl I get the following:

  performance:
    CpuDriver:	amd_pstate
    Degraded:   no

* balanced:
    CpuDriver:	amd_pstate
    PlatformDriver:	placeholder

  power-saver:
    CpuDriver:	amd_pstate
    PlatformDriver:	placeholder

powerprofilesctl version gives me:

0.20

I read around a bit, but didn’t really have a clue what might be going on or is everything ok?

6

You should have amd-pmf loaded. If you don’t then there is definitely something wrong.

To rule out a race condition at boot up I would suggest restarting power profiles daemon systemd unit. If it still doesn’t show up then try to load the kernel module manually.

7

First of all, thank you very much for your quick reply. Unfortunately, I am still more of a beginner in this area.

Do you mean with:

restarting power profiles daemon systemd unit

something like:

systemctl restart power-profiles-daemon.service

In any case, I tried it this way, but there is no change when executing powerprofilesctl afterwards.

I’m also still walking on thin ice with the kernel modules. Should I start with lsmod to check whether the module amd_pmf is available?
Anyway, I only get the following output, just pmc and no pmf:

lsmod | grep amd_pm
amd_pmc                45056  0
8

Sure.

Try running modinfo amd-pmf. If it doesn’t find it, then make sure you’re on the correct and latest kernel version for your distro. If you are, then there appears to be a kernel bug that it’s not built.

9

Hmm, modinfo amd-pmf gives me that the module is not found (also tried amd_pmf). I’m on kernel version 6.8.4-200.fc39.x86_64 which should be the latest one.

I would probably have a look tomorrow to see how I could report the kernel issue. Thank you again for your excellent service :slight_smile:

10

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2274069

1 Like
11

@Kiwi - You can boot into the 6.7 kernel, and amd-pmf should load correctly - as a temporary workaround.

If, when you reboot, grub does not show, you can either spam shift, or run the following from terminal:
# sudo grub2-editenv - unset menu_auto_hide

12

Mario has addressed everything here. We do not officially test against Debian, but following Mario’s suggestions are the best course forward or a kernel bug.

13

All right, thanks for the tip. If I find some time in the next few days, I’ll give it a try.

Oh yes, and thanks for reporting the bug, I would have had to spend a while researching how and where to do it :slight_smile:

1 Like