Do you know what is the other thing that 4.17 also does? Optimizing idle loops so your laptop can run cooler for longer.
Phoronix's initial testing seems to suggest a 10-20% less power usage while idle which is a fantastic news for those who own a Linux laptop.
Since 4.0 or so Linux has become rock solid for me so I no longer anticipate new kernel releases but this is one of those times I run the cutting edge kernel because it is so cool. If you run a relatively recent version of Ubuntu, you can also test by googling Kernel PPA. It's just three clicks away at most.
There's lots of reasons that might happen. Lots of businesses are tied to peaks at specific times of the day or seasonality. And not yet sophisticated enough to build in elasticity.
Even AWS has no reasonable automated way to be elastic in a vertical way, like auto changing instance size. Some apps can't scale well horizontally.
My database servers, for example, are built for "Easter Sunday Attendence" and underutilized the rest of the time. We do better with things like app and web servers, but there are inefficiencies.
The linked article mentions (on page 3) that, on servers, the gain was seen when not idling: "On this Tyan server, the idle power usage ended up being the same across these three most recent kernel branches. However, the power usage under load was found to have some nice improvements."
Also, if you're designing for high availability, you're going to overprovision by definition, otherwise the loss of a server or datacenter is going to cause a cascading failure.
Seems like so. From Phoronix: "I began the weekend work with trying out a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an Intel Core i7 5600U processor... It's a mature Broadwell platform that has been working well under Linux for years. But not exactly a system I would expect years later to have a significant power boost from."
I wonder if the time has come to add user-configurable resource consumption throttles to browsers, eg. settings for max CPU, max FPS (foreground and background) for developer-triggered redraws, etc. On my laptops I’d have it ratcheted all the way down, because not needing to plug in and my lap not being cooked is more important than whatever frills the websites I visit have. And if some site can’t run properly while throttled, well, there’s probably a more lightweight alternative I should be using instead.
You can do that with ulimit. But it affects the whole browser, so it is not very granular.
Tab-specific and/or domain-specific resource management would be more useful.
This sounds amazing and I'm looking forward to testing it. I'm thinking of finally pulling the trigger and getting my first non-Mac laptop in over half a decade. I've been rather impressed with how well Linux behaves on laptops nowadays. This is the cherry on top.
Phoronix's initial testing seems to suggest a 10-20% less power usage while idle which is a fantastic news for those who own a Linux laptop.
Since 4.0 or so Linux has become rock solid for me so I no longer anticipate new kernel releases but this is one of those times I run the cutting edge kernel because it is so cool. If you run a relatively recent version of Ubuntu, you can also test by googling Kernel PPA. It's just three clicks away at most.
Ref: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41...