Dell Getting Linux Power Management Optimized For Their Latest Systems + Upcoming Tiger Lake Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dell Getting Linux Power Management Optimized For Their Latest Systems + Upcoming Tiger Lake Desktop

Dell's Linux engineers continue working on improving the Linux kernel's handling around S0ix ACPI sub-states for greater energy savings...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-S0ix-i219LM-Fixing

[Guest]

Wait, does this mean suspend hasn't been working at all for Intel Tigerlake, due to this S0ix problem in e1000e ?

[ms178]

Will other Tiger Lake offerings eventually profit from this work, too? Why was a whitelist needed in the first place?

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I wish HP and Lenovo do the same.

[Teggs]

10 nm desktop has been coming every day for five years. That kind of thing is to be believed when it is seen.

I suppose they could do what AMD did with Zen 2 APUs and uprate a mobile CPU for 'desktop', but that would be a half-step at best in my opinion.

[polarathene]

Why was a whitelist needed in the first place?

Probably relies on a firmware update for e100e NIC chipset? I'm curious if the ethernet is disabled, does it workaround the power state issue it was causing or without the update all affected systems lack a workaround?

[polarathene]

For anyone unfamiliar with S0ix, it's suspend to idle, which allows for low power wifi state and such as opposed to S3 - the more familiar suspend to ram you all know. MS uses it for their surface tablets to get notifications while not in use and preserve battery, just like an iOS or Android device would do. Unfortunately, if all other components don't play nicely it ends up sucking more battery than S3 would.

Some vendors like Lenovo had enough customers complain about lack of S3 support that an update was given to switch to S3 instead in BIOS, but I think that was prior to TigerLake. I guess it won't be an option going forward then, bit of a worry since some hardware plays well with Windows but not so much with Linux, I remember an old laptop of mine the ethernet NIC (Killer something) was not useable due to Windows driver disabling it on shutdown, which for some reason only Windows was able to enable/disable the chipset, none of the usual utilities like ethtool had any ability to for that NIC.

In my current laptop, I think the display is the one that prevents lower power states due to it using an older eDP protocol before Panel-Self-Refresh (PSR) became available (2012? The panel was manufactured in 2017 and sold in a 2019Q3 CometLake product). S3 doesn't drain battery heavily, but S0ix couldn't get low enough IIRC, I don't think there was any notable power savings as a result.

[Guest]

10 nm desktop has been coming every day for five years. That kind of thing is to be believed when it is seen.

I suppose they could do what AMD did with Zen 2 APUs and uprate a mobile CPU for 'desktop', but that would be a half-step at best in my opinion.

Well if they released the Tigerlake CPUs in some NUC units, we'd technically have 10 nm on the desktop
Maybe they already did that with Icelake? I don't remember.