Proposed Energy Aware Scheduling For The Linux Kernel Revised A Tenth Time

The ARM Linux developers continue working on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the mainline Linux kernel to better handle systems with asymmetric CPU topologies, namely SoCs like those with ARM big.LITTLE cores.

Energy Aware Scheduling is designed to take into account information from the ARM Energy Model framework for making better scheduling decisions based upon the topology of the CPU cores with the performance and power characteristics. On ARM big.LITTLE systems EAS not only helped reduce energy usage by up to a few percent but also the performance in some workloads did improve by a percent or two.

The work for supporting Energy Aware Scheduling in the mainline Linux kernel has been in the works for months and Google's Android kernel has already been supporting this technology. The EAS mainline kernel patches were updated today for their tenth revision.

Judging from the patch changes, the churn of work on EAS is beginning to settle down. Hopefully it won't be much longer now before EAS is finally mainlined for helping ARM big.LITTLE systems running the mainline kernel tree.

Those unfamiliar with EAS up until now that would like to learn more background on it can do so via Linaro.org.