Intel Speed Select Technology Comes To Linux With The 5.3 Kernel

With the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel is now support for Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) that was introduced as part of Cascade Lake processors. Speed Select Technology allows optimizing the system with per-core performance configurations to prioritize certain workloads while lowering the performance envelope for other cores.

With the Linux 5.3 kernel there is now an Intel Speed Select Technology driver with these granular power/performance controls. With Cascade Lake and newer, these power and performance profiles can be configured from the OS and done dynamically based upon the real-time needs.

The Intel SST driver allows for a performance profile, an interface for defining per-core priority, an interface for controlling the base frequency of given cores, and support for setting different all-core turbo ratio limits based on priority.

More background information on Intel SST for Linux can be found via this patch series which as of yesterday was merged into the mainline kernel tree for the 5.3 merge window.