"Thermal Pressure" Kernel Feature Would Help Linux Performance When Running Hot

Linaro engineer Thara Gopinath sent out an experimental set of kernel patches today that introduces the concept of "thermal pressure" to the Linux kernel for helping assist Linux performance when the processor cores are running hot.

While the Linux CPU frequency scaling code already deals with the event of CPU core(s) overheating as to downclock/limit the frequency, the kernel's scheduler isn't currently aware of the CPU capacity restrictions put in place due to that thermal event.

ARM chips can get quite hot, but these kernel patches could help with performance in these scenarios...

The goal with this thermal pressure feature is to allow the scheduler to better place processes among the available CPUs during such overheating, which will help with performance.

With this thermal pressure patch-set while running the AOBench benchmark, they found the patches helped the performance of a HiKey960 development board by about 12%.

More details on this "request for comments" proposal via this patch series.