Well Known Linux Kernel Developer Recommends Against Buying Skylake Systems

Well known Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett who has led the charge for a number of years about UEFI/SecureBoot issues, poorly secured devices, and more, has taken aim now at Intel's latest-generation "Skylake" systems.

In particular, he says that Skylake's power management is "dreadful" and "you shouldn't buy [a Skylake system] until it's fixed." He explains on his Skylake system he can't get beyond the PC3 power-saving state even though SKL hardware supports PC8. He estimates he's burning 40% more power than necessary but none of the kernel developers seem to have a fix for being able to further reduce Skylake power consumption.

Intel's own documentation suggests all low-power idle states be enabled for long-term reliability, yet Linux isn't doing so. So Matthew Garrett concluded in his latest blog post, "which is pretty concerning. Without support for states deeper than PC3, Linux is running in a configuration that Intel imply may trigger premature failure. That's obviously not good. Until this situation is improved, you probably shouldn't buy any Skylake systems if you're planning on running Linux."