A Patch Is Being Worked On For Greater Kabylake Linux Performance With P-State

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Patch Is Being Worked On For Greater Kabylake Linux Performance With P-State

In our Intel Kabylake benchmarks we have shown how Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver used by most Linux distributions can lead to much lower performance with their latest-generation processors compared to the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver. Fortunately, action is taking place for improving the P-State performance with Kabylake...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=P-State-Kabylake-Patching

[andrebrait]

Do you have some Kaby Lake and Skylake laptops for comparison on mobile parts? Also, is the whole Skylake power management thing fixed as of Kernel 4.9?

EDIT: I was beginning to research this because I may get a Kaby Lake laptop in the coming weeks.

[indepe]

Isn't that the kind of thing a user would like to be able to turn on or off according to preference? OTOH, none of the Linux distributions seem to have a proper UI for selecting that kind of preference, so why provide the feature?

Of course, I do think the default for desktop use should be to allow full performance under full load. (Otherwise you could buy a cheaper CPU.) So its good to hear this gets fixed.

[defaultUser]

Isn't that the kind of thing a user would like to be able to turn on or off according to preference? OTOH, none of the Linux distributions seem to have a proper UI for selecting that kind of preference, so why provide the feature?

Of course, I do think the default for desktop use should be to allow full performance under full load. (Otherwise you could buy a cheaper CPU.) So its good to hear this gets fixed.

Its easy to set-up these and many others using the command line and there some projects providing UI for this, for instance the tuned-gui http://servicesblog.redhat.com/2012/...em-with-tuned/

[indepe]

Its easy to set-up these and many others using the command line and there some projects providing UI for this, for instance the tuned-gui http://servicesblog.redhat.com/2012/...em-with-tuned/

Thanks for the pointer, I'll take a look.

[saski]

I'm afraid this is more bad news for all Laptop users wanting a half way descent battery life.
I have a SKL and HSW Laptop. No deep Package states when idle on both systems. Idle power drain is 2-2.5x that of Windows.

[Vistaus]

I'm afraid this is more bad news for all Laptop users wanting a half way descent battery life.
I have a SKL and HSW Laptop. No deep Package states when idle on both systems. Idle power drain is 2-2.5x that of Windows.

I run Solus (and sometimes Arch) on my Dell Chromebook 13 (and so does my dad btw) and battery life is great with Intel. I do quite a lot of stuff on it during the day and leave it idle most of the evening and overnight and I only have to charge once every 1,5 days (and charging is finished in just over an hour!). Solus has TLP enabled by default, so maybe that explains part of the reason battery life is so long.

[arjan_intel]

I'm afraid this is more bad news for all Laptop users wanting a half way descent battery life.
I have a SKL and HSW Laptop. No deep Package states when idle on both systems. Idle power drain is 2-2.5x that of Windows.

is this with powertop tunables all showing ok ?

[saski]

is this with powertop tunables all showing ok ?

Yeah powertop --auto-tune showing everything "Good", also experimented with TLP. Saved a few watts here and there for example by turning off internal card reader. Lowest package states (below PC3) are almost never reached. I guess something in my laptop is keeping the CPU from entering lower states.This issue occurs on my Lenovo T440p with an i7-4600M for example. Powertop reports ~14 Watts drain when idle and screen dimmed to lowest. Maybe users with a ULV CPU have more luck saving power .

[DanL]

Isn't that the kind of thing a user would like to be able to turn on or off according to preference?

I agree that the user should be able to control something like this.

OTOH, none of the Linux distributions seem to have a proper UI for selecting that kind of preference, so why provide the feature?

It should be controllable in BIOS/EFI, no?