Intel Workload Hints, Zen RAPL PowerCap + Other Power/Thermal Changes For Linux 5.11

The ACPI / power management and thermal pull requests were all sent out and merged this week for the ongoing Linux 5.11 development.

The power management and thermal updates to the Linux kernel for 5.11 aren't the most exciting in recent time but there still are a few additions worth calling attention to for what will be the first major kernel release of 2021.

Power management updates for Linux 5.11 include:

- AMD Zen 1 through Zen 3 support in the RAPL PowerCapping driver.

- Cleanups to CPUFreq, Intel P-State, and Schedutil CPUFreq code. The CPUFreq CPPC code also saw cleanups.

- A number of ARM updates like MT8167 SoC support in the Mediatek CPUFreq driver, Tegra improvements, and other work.

There are also other specific changes outlined via this pull request.

The thermal code for Linux 5.11 meanwhile saw:'

- Lewisburg PCH temperature support after it was accidentally missing for years.

- PCI IDs for the Alder Lake PCH were added.

- Support for passing workload hints to the Intel int340x thermal framework for helping it decide on thermal/power behavior. It will be interesting to see how well this works out in practice.

The list of thermal changes can be found via this pull request.