Linux 4.17 Will Allow Some Systems To Lower Their Idle Power Use Up To 10%+

While last week was the main power management feature updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window that included the new ACPI TAD driver, Rafael Wysocki today sent in a secondary set of feature updates and it includes a rather significant development for Linux power and performance.

The kernel's idle loop has been reworked to prevent processors from spending too much time in shallow idle states. Following this significant code rework, there is the potential for power-savings while the system is idling as well as in select workloads.

Rafael reports that the idle power on some systems could drop by "10% or more", but that's not all. The performance of workloads where the idle loop overhead was previously significant could now see greater gains too.

All the details in this pull request from earlier today. I'll certainly be putting Linux 4.17 through a variety of power benchmarks on different hardware platforms once the merge window has passed this weekend... Stay tuned for some exciting Linux 4.17 kernel benchmarks given all the activity on many different fronts.