Arm Talks Up Linux 5.0's Energy Aware Scheduling

With Linux 5.0 that is coming out next weekend, one of the features worth talking up on the Arm side is the long in development work on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS).

Linux 5.0 (nee 4.21) features the initial support for Energy Aware Scheduling now that upstream developers are finally happy with the shape of the code. EAS is designed to make the scheduler aware of asymmetric CPU topologies on systems like Arm's big.LITTLE SoCs where not all of the cores are of the same power/performance level. EAS allows the scheduler to make smarter choices based upon the actual topology of the CPU cores and their characteristics.

EAS is mostly beneficial for reducing power consumption but in some workloads the performance can be faintly increased. The numbers shared by Arm appear to be quite positive indeed compared to the prior non-EAS state with pre-5.0 mainline kernels:

More details on Energy Aware Scheduling with Linux 5.0 can be found via this Arm blog post. Of course, outside of the mainline kernel, EAS has been supported by Google's Android kernel and other downstream kernel variants for years.