Linux 4.17 seems to become more energy-efficient
The Linux 4.17-rc1 kernel appeared in the run-up to the stable release, which is likely to be expected mid-June. One of the improvements concerns energy management; Linux seems to consume less in idle mode.
Rafael J. Wysocki of Intel, who manages the acpi subsystem of Linux, reports in an explanation of the improvements in energy management that particularly the idle loop has been rebuilt to prevent cpu’s remaining in idle modes for too long. “This reduces the idle consumption on some systems by 10 percent or more,” he writes on the Linux Kernel mailing list.
Phoronix took the test and submitted a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop with an economical Core i7 from the Broadwell generation to a test with Linux 4.15, 4.16 and 4.17 Git. In idle mode, the laptop indeed consumed significantly less so that the operating system might close the gap with Windows that was created. A server with two Xeon Gold 6138 processors also showed improvements in consumption with Linux 4.17, idle as well as during use.
Linus Tovalds officially announced Linux 4.17-rc1 and indicated that it was not is going to be a particularly large release, but the Linux community has been phasing the limit of six million git objects. “That is reason enough to mention the next kernel 5.0, except that I probably will not do that because I do not want to be predictable.”