Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
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Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#2> The code has been implemented as part of the Linux kernel release version 6.13 in January.
This is basically 3 month old news now.
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#3Wow busy waiting is more resource intensive than I realized.
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#4> The code has been implemented as part of the Linux kernel release version 6.13 in January. This is basically 3 month old news now.
If you read the original commit comment, userspace software needs to opt into this:
https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds...
If it is not reported for people to know about it, this will do nothing.
That said, the opt-in here is only relevant when software has already opted into busy polling, so it likely does not apply to software used outside of datacenters.
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#5Linux added a busy polling feature for high performance networking. Most Linux software does not use it, but software used in datacenters (e.g. by CDNs) that does use it makes the system very energy inefficient when things are not busy. This patch gives the the kernel the ability to turn that off when not busy to regain energy efficiency until things become busy again.
The article name is somewhat misleading, since it makes it sound like this would also apply to desktop workloads. The article says it is for datacenters and that is true, but it would have been better had the title ended with the words “in datacenters” to avoid confusion.
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#6[flagged]
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#7This is really cool. As a high-performance computing professional, I've often wondered how much energy is wasted due to inefficient code and how much that is a problem as planetary compute scales up.
For me, it feels like a moral imperative to make my code as efficient as possible, especially when a job will take months to run on hundreds of CPU.
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#8For a more detailed look at this change: https://lwn.net/Articles/1008399/
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#9> The code has been implemented as part of the Linux kernel release version 6.13 in January. This is basically 3 month old news now.
Did you know about this before reading the article?
Re: Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
#10Linux added a busy polling feature for high performance networking. Most Linux software does not use it, but software used in datacenters (e.g. by CDNs) that does use it makes the system very energy inefficient when things are not busy. This patch gives the the kernel the ability to turn that off when not busy to regain energy efficiency until things become busy again. The article name is somewhat misleading, since i…
you don’t have to say “in datacenters” when talking about linux, that is the obvious context in the vast majority of cases