Intel Ironlake Receives Patches For RC6 Power Savings

Intel Ironlake "Gen 5" graphics have been around for seven years now since being found in Clarkdale and Arrandale processors while finally now the patches are all worked out for enabling RC6 power-savings support under Linux.

If you are still using Intel Ironlake graphics, it's really time to thinking about upgrading to something post-Haswell for a decent modern Linux desktop experience. But if you're stuck with Ironlake, at least kernel patches will make it a bit more power efficient thanks to RC6 power-savings.

This is about the power-savings mode for hitting the render C-state 6. Ironlake hadn't supported this mode due to power contexts not being implemented, but Intel's Chris Wilson has finally got around to implementing said functionality. Back in 2011 there were some RC6 patches for Ironlake, but were buggy during testing. In 2013 they tried again for this deeper power savings on Ironlake but ultimately failed again, until these latest patches we'll see how it goes during their QA/testing process.

There are 21 DRM patches for getting the Ironlake support improved.