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 .