[PATCH V3 00/10] PM: Create the AVS(Adaptive Voltage Scaling)

[J, KEERTHY]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 2:31 AM, Kevin Hilman <khilman at ti.com> wrote:
> Hi Mark,
>
> Mark Brown <broonie at opensource.wolfsonmicro.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 11:09:10AM +0530, J, KEERTHY wrote:
>>
>>> Devfreq and cpufreq are related to dynamic frequency/voltage switching between
>>> pre defined Operating Performance Points or the OPPs. Every OPP being
>>> a voltage/frequency pair. Smartreflex is a different
>>> power management technique.
>>
>> But presumably these things should integrate somehow - for example,
>> should devfreq and cpufreq be providing inputs into what AVS is doing,
>> and if so how?
>
> The way it is currently designed, cpufreq/devfreq/regulator layers don't
> need to know about AVS.
>
> The higher-level layers only know about the "nominal" voltage.  AVS
> hardware does automatic, adaptive, micro-adjustments around that nominal
> voltage, and these micro-adjustments are managed by the AVS hardware
> sending commands to the PMIC.  (specifically, on OMAP, the AVS sensors
> provide inputs to the voltage processor (VP) which provide inputs to the
> voltage controller (VC) which sends commands to the PMIC[1].)
>
> The driver proposed here is primarily for initializing the various
> parameters/sensitivity/etc. of the AVS hardware, but the actual voltage
> adjustments are done in hardware by VC/VP.
>
> The only thing the higher-level layers might potentially need to do to
> enable/disable AVS around transitions (e.g. when changing OPP, AVS is
> disabled before changing OPP and only re-enabled when the new nominal
> voltage has been acheived.)
>
> On OMAP, we handle this inside the OMAP-specific voltage layer which is
> called by the regulator framework, so even the regulators do not need
> any knowledge of AVS.
>
> Kevin
>
> [1] Figure 3-76 in OMAP4430 ES2.1 Public TRM vAD provides a
>    detailed diagram:
>    http://www.ti.com/pdfs/wtbu/OMAP4430_ES2.x_PUBLIC_TRM_vAD.zip

Thanks for the detailed answer Kevin.

-- 
Regards and Thanks,
Keerthy