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Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

Do you know what is the other thing that 4.17 also does? Optimizing idle loops so your laptop can run cooler for longer.

Phoronix's initial testing seems to suggest a 10-20% less power usage while idle which is a fantastic news for those who own a Linux laptop.

Since 4.0 or so Linux has become rock solid for me so I no longer anticipate new kernel releases but this is one of those times I run the cutting edge kernel because it is so cool. If you run a relatively recent version of Ubuntu, you can also test by googling Kernel PPA. It's just three clicks away at most.

Ref: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41...

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I think laptops are only one tiny part of why we should be excited about it.

Imagine the carbon footprint difference on a server farm...

Hopefully your server farm isn't idling enough to make much of a difference.

The linked article mentions (on page 3) that, on servers, the gain was seen when not idling: "On this Tyan server, the idle power usage ended up being the same across these three most recent kernel branches. However, the power usage under load was found to have some nice improvements."

Many if not most servers are more idle than not in my experience. I haven’t seen many servers that utilize > 50% CPU on average.

Also, if you're designing for high availability, you're going to overprovision by definition, otherwise the loss of a server or datacenter is going to cause a cascading failure.

There's lots of reasons that might happen. Lots of businesses are tied to peaks at specific times of the day or seasonality. And not yet sophisticated enough to build in elasticity.

Even AWS has no reasonable automated way to be elastic in a vertical way, like auto changing instance size. Some apps can't scale well horizontally.

My database servers, for example, are built for "Easter Sunday Attendence" and underutilized the rest of the time. We do better with things like app and web servers, but there are inefficiencies.

It's not just the power used while idling. It's the power usage in general.

>This does not seem to be shaping up to be a particularly big release, and there seems to be nothing particularly special about it.

>10-20% less power usage

Is this one of those "not big and professional like GNU" Linus moments?

> 10-20%

That's insane. Does this apply to all laptops running Linux?

Seems like so. From Phoronix: "I began the weekend work with trying out a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an Intel Core i7 5600U processor... It's a mature Broadwell platform that has been working well under Linux for years. But not exactly a system I would expect years later to have a significant power boost from."

> while idle

Which never happens on laptops because of the web browser /s

Firefox Quantum seems to beat Chrome in this area.

I wonder if the time has come to add user-configurable resource consumption throttles to browsers, eg. settings for max CPU, max FPS (foreground and background) for developer-triggered redraws, etc. On my laptops I’d have it ratcheted all the way down, because not needing to plug in and my lap not being cooked is more important than whatever frills the websites I visit have. And if some site can’t run properly while throttled, well, there’s probably a more lightweight alternative I should be using instead.

You can do that with ulimit. But it affects the whole browser, so it is not very granular. Tab-specific and/or domain-specific resource management would be more useful.

If using Firefox, I'm very happy using "Auto Tab Discard". It does what you want.

Cheers for the repo reminder, installing this now, really hoping this will make my air go longer.

FYI link to packages: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.17-rc1/

This should be in the title! What an improvement!

This sounds amazing and I'm looking forward to testing it. I'm thinking of finally pulling the trigger and getting my first non-Mac laptop in over half a decade. I've been rather impressed with how well Linux behaves on laptops nowadays. This is the cherry on top.

Well now is a good time. The next Ubuntu LTS is about to appear; 18.04 will be released on April 26 and is supported until April 2023.

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