Intel's FRED Getting Ready To Meet The Linux Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's FRED Getting Ready To Meet The Linux Kernel

Since last year Intel Linux engineers have been busy working on FRED support for the Flexible Return and Event Delivery specification that will be found with future-generation processors. FRED overhauls how CPU transitions are handled between privilege levels and a design goal of lowering transition latencies and allow for more robust software use-cases...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-FRED-Nears-Mainline

[coder]

Cool tech, rubbish name. It gives me serious Microsoft Bob vibes.

Naming aside, I think this could be key for seeing better performance-scaling on the more fine-grained among multithreaded workloads, as well as obviously reducing syscall overhead.

Performance-scaling of multithreaded workloads is pretty easy, if your threads work along coarse-grained boundaries and do minimal synchronization and communication. However, not all workloads fit into that category, especially if we're talking about things like OpenMP or languages with threading support even more deeply-ingrained.

And who doesn't want cheaper syscalls, especially if you're avoid io_uring.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.6-sysctl-IO_uring