APU Core Performance Boost

Good Morning

Anyone know anything about this?

https://github.com/pcengines/apu2-documentation/blob/master/docs/apu_CPU_boost.md

I’ve been looking at it but I don’t know if it can be implemented or if it is correct to do so.

Regards

Yes, this is enabled by default on all IPFire Mini Appliances.

We did benchmarks around it, but I guess for our use-case it is practically worthless:

There are not many tasks that are running on a single processor.

We try to do the opposite by load-balancing packet handling and the Intrusion Prevention System across all cores. Then, the system cannot enable the turbo mode and it is not helpful either, because all cores running at their base clock are faster than one core being overclocked.

Additionally, the AMD processor on the board takes a very long time to switch clock and pauses for a brief moment. It only makes sense to do this for longer work and not for bursts. Again something that is a little bit incompatible with our use case.

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Thanks Michael for the fast reply.

Bye.

I did a test on my APU2 board: loaded twice all GeoIP database in FW: once for incoming traffic and once for outgoing.
Then added a few outgoing permissions for a few cloud providers (Amazon, Azure, Akamai, etc) - even these rules were containing large number of IP addresses (check RDAP databases for these cloud providers)
As result to this test, one of the CPU core was loaded 100% and network speed was limited to 10-15 Mbps.
Removing the rules for outgoing traffic, the CPU load was marginal and I reached the full 100 Mbps bandwidth my ISP provides to me…

I guess FW is one of the processes that uses a single core and a big to huge FW list of IP Addresses can overload APU2 CPU core…

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