powercap/drivers/dtpm: Add API for dynamic thermal power management

On the embedded world, the complexity of the SoC leads to an
increasing number of hotspots which need to be monitored and mitigated
as a whole in order to prevent the temperature to go above the
normative and legally stated 'skin temperature'.

Another aspect is to sustain the performance for a given power budget,
for example virtual reality where the user can feel dizziness if the
GPU performance is capped while a big CPU is processing something
else. Or reduce the battery charging because the dissipated power is
too high compared with the power consumed by other devices.

The userspace is the most adequate place to dynamically act on the
different devices by limiting their power given an application
profile: it has the knowledge of the platform.

These userspace daemons are in charge of the Dynamic Thermal Power
Management (DTPM).

Nowadays, the dtpm daemons are abusing the thermal framework as they
act on the cooling device state to force a specific and arbitrary
state without taking care of the governor decisions. Given the closed
loop of some governors that can confuse the logic or directly enter in
a decision conflict.

As the number of cooling device support is limited today to the CPU
and the GPU, the dtpm daemons have little control on the power
dissipation of the system. The out of tree solutions are hacking
around here and there in the drivers, in the frameworks to have
control on the devices. The common solution is to declare them as
cooling devices.

There is no unification of the power limitation unit, opaque states
are used.

This patch provides a way to create a hierarchy of constraints using
the powercap framework. The devices which are registered as power
limit-able devices are represented in this hierarchy as a tree. They
are linked together with intermediate nodes which are just there to
propagate the constraint to the children.

The leaves of the tree are the real devices, the intermediate nodes
are virtual, aggregating the children constraints and power
characteristics.

Each node have a weight on a 2^10 basis, in order to reflect the
percentage of power distribution of the children's node. This
percentage is used to dispatch the power limit to the children.

The weight is computed against the max power of the siblings.

This simple approach allows to do a fair distribution of the power
limit.

Signed-off-by: Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Lukasz Luba <lukasz.luba@arm.com>
Tested-by: Lukasz Luba <lukasz.luba@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/powercap/Kconfig b/drivers/powercap/Kconfig
index bc228725346b..cc1953bd8bed 100644
--- a/drivers/powercap/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/powercap/Kconfig
@@ -43,4 +43,10 @@ config IDLE_INJECT
 	  CPUs for power capping. Idle period can be injected
 	  synchronously on a set of specified CPUs or alternatively
 	  on a per CPU basis.
+
+config DTPM
+	bool "Power capping for Dynamic Thermal Power Management"
+	help
+	  This enables support for the power capping for the dynamic
+	  thermal power management userspace engine.
 endif