Use of Linux on battery-powered systems continues to grow, and general energy-efficiency concerns are not going away any time soon. The Power Management and Energy-awareness micro-conference therefore continues a Linux Plumbers Conference tradition of looking into ways to improve energy efficiency.

In spite of significant progress made over the last year on multiple fronts, including but not limited to the enhancements of the scheduler’s load-tracking facility with an improved awareness of the amount of time taken by realtime processes, deadline processes, and interrupt handling in order to improve CPU performance scaling, the work on implementing energy-aware scheduling on asymmetric systems in the kernel (https://lwn.net/Articles/749900/), and the process utilization clamping patch series (https://lwn.net/Articles/762043/), there still are open issues to be discussed and new ideas to consider. This year, the focus is on energy-optimized task scheduling, user space interfaces for passing power/performance hints to the kernel, platform power management mechanisms and power management frameworks.

Specific topics include energy-aware scheduling, per-task and per-cgroup performance hints, timer granularity issues in the runtime PM framework, generic power domains (genpd) framework enhancements, firmware-based and direct control of low-level power management features of computing platforms, a proposed on-chip interconnect API, and improving selection of CPU idle states.

If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please feel free to contact Rafael (rafael@kernel.org) or Morten (morten.rasmussen@arm.com).

We hope to see you there!