Intel DPTF Battery Support Published For Linux

Intel is extending their Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) Linux support with battery participant device support.

The patches posted on Friday for the DPTF battery support expose new DPTF dynamic tuning information regarding laptop/ultrabook battery capabilities. Exposed are the maximum platform power that can be supported by the given battery, the maximum sustained power for the battery, the high frequency impedance value from the battery fuel gauge, and battery discharge current capability. The information is exposed via sysfs to user-space and also notification support for changes to the Intel Dynamic Tuning Battery state.

Intel Dynamic Tuning with the battery integration appears to have been around for a while albeit the first time this DPTF information is being exposed under Linux. Then again, DPTF isn't too exciting to most Linux users since advanced DPTF usage requires binary blobs on Linux that turn some off to this technology as well as having something extra that needs to be installed on Linux distributions. Ultimately though with this extra Dynamic Tuning battery information the Intel Thermal Daemon for Linux aims to make more intelligent thermal/power decisions.

These DPTF battery patches can be found on the kernel mailing list though due to the timing it isn't clear yet if it will be mainlined for Linux 5.8 or postponed to 5.9.