Intel Lunar Lake Workload Hints & Power Floor Patches Posted For Linux

Intel software engineers have been upstreaming the Lunar Lake support for Linux a number of months already and the basics appear in good shape, aside from the Xe2 graphics enablement being an ongoing matter. Much of the rest of the core functionality has appeared to be in good shape ahead of Lunar Lake laptops launching in Q3, but it seems there have been a few missing power management related bits.

As written about earlier this week, only in recent days have patches surfaced for enabling Lunar Lake's Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (DLVR) support for that power conservation/optimization feature.

In addition to the DLVR patches, hitting the mailing lists this week as well were Lunar Lake patches for processor thermal interrupts with adding support for Workload Hints (WLT) and power floor support with Intel's int340x driver. The thermal interrupt support with Lunar Lake is overhauled with the legacy PCI interrupts no longer being supported for the thermal device. Instead MSI sources are relied on for the package thermal, DDR thermal, power floor, and workload type hints.

Intel's workload type hints allow for communicating the predicted workload type from idling to optimizing for battery life, sustained performance, bursty, or unknown. The power floor notifications are for if the hardware reduces the CPU power to a minimum possible value either due to RAPL/PowerCap limiting or other restraints.

Intel Reveals New Lunar Lake Details At Computex

See this patch series if interested in these latest Lunuar Lake thermal/power patches. Hopefully these int340x driver patches will be queued in time for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel merge window so that v6.11 will hopefully be in good shape as the next-gen Intel Core Ultra laptops begin appearing in the coming months.