Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Support For Linux

Earlier this year I heard from an Intel PR representative they had no plans for a Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Linux driver and immediately heard after that from a developer it was bollocks from the media department as usual. Today patches have emerged for supporting Turbo Boost Max 3.0 in the Linux kernel.

Turbo Boost Max 3.0 is a feature to the Intel Broadwell-E CPUs and presumably more forthcoming high-end CPUs. Turbo Boost Max 3.0 is about boosting the frequency of a single CPU core when a single-threaded application is busy on the system occupied. TBM Tech 3.0 is in contrast to Turbo Boost 2.0 that boosts the frequency of all CPU cores when needed for short periods of time. But over the older Turbo Boost tech, TBM 3.0 can maintain its single-boosted-core frequency for a longer duration.

Patches published by Srinivas Pandruvada on Tuesday provide support for Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 along with CPUFreq and scheduler changes. TBM 3.0 is disabled by default but can be enabled via sysfs: echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sched_itmt_enabled.

The patches for now can be found on the kernel mailing list and will hopefully be ready for merging into the Linux 4.9 kernel.