Linux 4.3 PowerClamp Driver To Support Skylake & Denlow

One of the late pull requests in for the Linux 4.3 merge window is the thermal driver updates.

Zhang Rui sent in the Linux 4.3 thermal updates this morning to the LKML.

Additions include the PowerClamp driver supporting now Skylake H/S/U/Y processors as well as the existing Intel "Denlow" server platform. The PowerClamp driver is used for limiting the system's power consumption at runtime to provide support for forced and controllable C-state residency. With Linux 4.3, power-clamping should work for the latest Skylake processors.

Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake Linux CPU Benchmarks

There's also a new Intel PCH thermal driver with Linux 4.3. This new thermal driver is for the Wildcat Point platform controller and registers the PCH thermal sensor and associated critical and hot trips. Wildcat Point was the codename for the H97/Z97 chipsets as part of the Haswell Refresh.

It's great to see more Intel contributions going upstream to the Linux kernel, but a bit surprising that with Skylake they've been later than usual in pushing some final bits of support into the Linux kernel. It's also with Linux 4.3 that there's sound changes and enabling graphics acceleration by default. Then again, so far it's still hard finding large quantities of Skylake CPUs.