Linux 4.8 Bringing ACPI Low-Power Idle, Intel Denverton Support

Rafael Wysocki on Tuesday submitted his power management and ACPI pull request feature updates for the Linux 4.8 kernel.

When it comes to the power management pull request, there have been continued updates to the CPUFreq subsystem. There aren't any earth-shattering new CPUFreq features for 4.8, but some code clean-ups, some reworking of the handling of frequency tables, and more. The power management pull also has some hibernation core changes, devfreq updates, and more.

Intel Denverton, a forthcoming micro-server chip, also saw support for it added to the intel_idle driver. Denverton was also added to the Intel RAPL power-capping driver. Intel Broxton meanwhile saw support added to the Intel P-State scaling driver.

The power management pull for Linux 4.8 can be viewed here.

Ovier in ACPI space the Linux 4.8 kernel adds support for ACPI overlays, which allow for ACPI tables to be loaded dynamically from EFI variables or ConfigFS. Also new is support for ACPI Low-Power Idle (LPI). Low-Power Idle was added to ACPI 6.0 and allows for dealing with low-power idle states of the processor to be represented in ACPI tables. There's also now support for ACPI idle states management on ARM64.

This second pull request also has support for platform-initiated graceful shutdown added to ACPI 6.1, support for the Boot Error Record Table in APEI, ACPI EC clean-ups, reboot code changes, and more. Those ACPI details can be seen here.