Linux 4.17 seems to be getting more energy efficient

The Linux 4.17-rc1 kernel has appeared in the run-up to the stable release, which is expected to be released in mid-June. One of the improvements concerns power management; Linux seems to consume less in idle mode.

Rafael J. Wysocki of Intel, who manages Linux’s acpi subsystem, notes in a commentary on the power management improvements that the idle loop in particular has been rebuilt to prevent CPUs from spending too much time in less frugal idle modes. . “This reduces idle consumption by 10 percent or more on some systems,” he writes on the Linux Kernel mailing list.

Phoronix put it to the test and put a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop with a frugal Broadwell-generation Core i7 through a test with Linux 4.15, 4.16, and 4.17 Git. The laptop indeed consumed significantly less in idle mode, which means that the operating system may be able to close the gap with Windows that has arisen. Also a server with two Xeon Gold 6138 processors showed consumption improvements with Linux 4.17, both idle and in use.

Linus Torvalds officially announced Linux 4.17-rc1, noting that it isn’t a particularly big release, but that the Linux community has passed the six million git object mark. “That’s reason enough to call the next kernel 5.0, except I probably won’t because I don’t want to be too predictable.”