Leaving the Desktop Market

[Allan Jude]

On 2014-04-01 03:11, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> 
> 1. Power.  As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that.  You need to optimize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (which actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), you need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a process management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how to schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just goes on and on.  It’s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work you also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running around hitting people who write power-inefficient code.  FreeBSD has neither.
> 

There is some advantage to focusing on power in the Server and Embedded
space. Saving power in a rack full of machines would be a very big win,
and it could be especially important in embedded.

As Jordan mentions, a kernel scheduler that is aware of power management
could do big things here. It may also be able to provide a performance
boost, Intel's TurboBoost feature is controlled via power management,
and only lights off under specific circumstances, unlocking that extra
performance at key times may also be a big win.

> 
> - Jordan
> 
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-- 
Allan Jude

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