Intel DPTF Adaptive Policy Being Reverse Engineered For Better Linux Ultrabook Support

One of the areas of Intel's Linux support that has been less than ideal is their handling of the Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) for today's ultrabook. Intel has provided some support with a focus on Google's Chromium OS but it's less than complete and notably missing is support for the more advanced "adaptive policy", but that soon could change.

Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework support for Linux is less than complete and does not support the adaptive policy used by various Intel-powered ultrabooks and when that support isn't available can lead to more conservative power management decisions that in turn hurts performance.

Matthew Garrett of Google's security team by day doesn't have much else going on during the pandemic so he's been working on studying the open-source code that is available as well as reverse-engineering the Windows DPTF support.

He has been working on improvements to Intel's Thermal Daemon for Linux as well as to replace a binary-only utility for parsing DPTF tables in the system firmware.

Via this kernel repository is the initial work on these improvements both to the Linux kernel and the user-space bits. So far only a small portion of the possible functionality is in place. He's unsure just how good the code is right now but at least on his lone test machine is working out well enough to call for wider testing by the community.

More details on the work via this blog post.