Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out [1]Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month.

Rather than package-level thermal interrupts being broadcast to all CPU cores, directed package thermal interrupts allow [2]broadcasting to just one CPU core tasked for handling the package-wide events. This feature in turn enables reduced resource contention and avoids needlessly waking up the rest of possibly idle CPU cores.

Code queued into the power management tree ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window enables the Directed Package-level Thermal Interrupt support while falling back gracefully for CPUs without this support. For those older platforms, the thermal information is broadcast still to all CPU cores.

[3]This commit gets the support added to linux-pm.git and thus look forward to it being submitted for the Linux 7.3 merge window during the back half of August.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Directed-Pkg-Thermal-Int

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Directed-Pkg-Therm-Inter

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux-pm.git/commit/?h=linux-next&id=15520ed82bc62df2b66dee8000cf33d0ee635d53