The State & Future Of Linux Power Management (2016)

Linux's power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki presented at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin about the state and future of power management in the Linux kernel.

The Linux power management's goal is obviously about using only as much energy as needed to achieve sufficient performance. Looking ahead at the Linux PM stack, Rafael doesn't see hibernation going away but there are implications around encrypted images and persistent memory. Future hardware platforms may also reduce the effectiveness of suspend-to-RAM and standby while suspend-to-idle may make more sense and also be more efficient than current hardware.

There is also the ongoing work about passing hints from the kernel's CPU scheduler onto the CPU frequency scaling governor as with the recent Schedutil governor and similar efforts on recent kernel releases. Looking ahead, Rafael believes we will see power management aware scheduling for the mainline kernel and that CPUFreq and CPUIdle could be combined.

Those looking for more information about the current state of Linux power management and future trends, you can find the PDF slides from the LinuxCon Europe presentation. No videos are available as of yet.