powerprofile and amd pstate

[Jiogo18]

Thanks @mutchiko , I have pstate now!

Continuation of #249 (comment)
I found msi-ec issue 76 talking about pstate, but it doesn't cover CPPC, so here is what I did.

I had the _CPC warning for ever and didn't bother enough to fix it.

1. Ensure the CPU has cppc lscpu | grep cppc
2. Update Bios (I had E16WKAMS.110 from 2020, MSI released .116 earlier this month, build 2026-02-12).
3. Show Advanced Menu, "Unlock bios msi", be carefull!
4. Enable CPPC, exactly the same steps as the archwiki instructions

I didn't need the amd_pstate flag.

cpupower frequency-info

analyzing CPU 10:
  driver: amd-pstate-epp
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 10
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 10
  energy performance preference: balance_performance
  hardware limits: 409 MHz - 4.01 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.12 GHz and 4.01 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 3.98 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes
  amd-pstate limits:
    Highest Performance: 255. Maximum Frequency: 4.01 GHz.
    Nominal Performance: 191. Nominal Frequency: 3.00 GHz.
    Lowest Non-linear Performance: 71. Lowest Non-linear Frequency: 1.12 GHz.
    Lowest Performance: 26. Lowest Frequency: 400 MHz.
    Preferred Core Support: 0. Preferred Core Ranking: 255.

powerprofilectl

  performance:
    CpuDriver:  amd_pstate
    Degraded:   no

* balanced:
    CpuDriver:  amd_pstate
    PlatformDriver:     placeholder

  power-saver:
    CpuDriver:  amd_pstate
    PlatformDriver:     placeholder

I can now use and automate KDE Power Profile instead of using sudo cpupower frequency-set -g schedutil.

[mutchiko]

Glad that i could help

At first i was kind of surprised, why was powerprofilesdaemon handicapped like that,
Then i wondered why is a regular scheduler enabled by default and not amd-pstate, and on cachyOS of all distros.

In the end i remembered my own laptop in early 2024 when amd-pstate drivers were becoming a thing, whereas intel-pstate was already supported on linux for a good while.

By the way preferred core isn't a thing on zen 2, its zen 3 and later, and even that feature took its time to stabilize on linux, mid 2025 i think

Let me remind you that zen 3 was released late 2020, so 5 years to get the hardware functionality. god knows what was left unimplemented yet

[mutchiko]

Also thanks for sharing the steps, im sure it'll be of help to somebody