On Wednesday, 17 September 2025 15:28:59 Central European Summer Time Ulf Hansson wrote: > On Wed, 17 Sept 2025 at 14:23, Nicolas Frattaroli > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > This series introduces two new drivers to accomplish controlling the > > frequency and power of the Mali GPU on MediaTek MT8196 SoCs. > > > > The reason why it's not as straightforward as with other SoCs is that > > the MT8196 has quite complex glue logic in order to squeeze the maximum > > amount of performance possible out of the silicon. There's an additional > > MCU running a specialised firmware, which communicates with the > > application processor through a mailbox and some SRAM, and is in charge > > of controlling the regulators, the PLL clocks, and the power gating of > > the GPU, all while also being in charge of any DVFS control. > > > > This set of drivers is enough to communicate desired OPP index limits to > > the aforementioned MCU, referred to as "GPUEB" from here on out. The > > GPUEB is still free to lower the effective frequency if the GPU has no > > jobs going on at all, even when a higher OPP is set. There's also > > several more powerful OPPs it seemingly refuses to apply. The downstream > > chromeos kernel also doesn't reach the frequencies of those OPPs, so we > > assume this is expected. > > > > The frequency control driver lives in panthor's subdirectory, as it > > needs to pass panthor some data. I've kept the tie-in parts generic > > enough however to not make this a complete hack; mediatek_mfg (the > > frequency control driver) registers itself as a "devfreq provider" with > > panthor, and panthor picks it up during its probe function (or defers if > > mediatek_mfg is not ready yet, after adding a device link first). > > > > It's now generic enough to where I'll ponder about moving the devfreq > > provider stuff into a header in include/, and moving mediatek_mfg into > > the drivers/soc/ subdirectory, but there were enough changes so far to > > warrant a v3 without a move or further struct renames added, so that I > > can get feedback on this approach. > > > > The mailbox driver is a fairly bog-standard common mailbox framework > > driver, just specific to the firmware that runs on the GPUEB. > > I had a brief look at the series and it seems to me that the devfreq > thing here, may not be the perfect fit. > > Rather than using a new binding (#performance-domain-cells) to model > a performance domain provider using devfreq, I think it could be more > straightforward to model this using the common #power-domain-cells > binding instead. As a power-domain provider then, which would be > capable of scaling performance too. Both genpd and the OPP core > already support this, though via performance-states (as indexes). > > In fact, this looks very similar to what we have implemented for the > Arm SCMI performance domain. > > If you have a look at the below, I think it should give you an idea of > the pieces. > drivers/pmdomain/arm/scmi_perf_domain.c > drivers/firmware/arm_scmi/perf.c > Documentation/devicetree/bindings/firmware/arm,scmi.yaml (protocol@13 > is the performance protocol). > > That said, I don't have a strong opinion, but just wanted to share my > thoughts on your approach.
Yeah, I found out about the pmdomain set_performance_state callback a few days ago. I've not looked into it much so far because not unlike a veterinarian on a cattle ranch, I was elbow-deep in v3's guts already and didn't want to pivot to something different before pushing it out, but I'll look into it more seriously now. Even if it means I have to get rid of my fun array binary search and rely on the opp core to do its linear time linked list traversal. :'( (But moving OPP core to use XArrays instead is a concern for the future.) I've also been avoiding it because I didn't know how much additional functionality we'll add later, but I've talked with Angelo about it an hour ago and he agrees that I should go down the pmdomain route for the current functionality. Thank you for the hints! Kind regards, Nicolas Frattaroli > > [...] > > Kind regards > Uffe >
