One thing I didn’t see mentioned here yet: a lot of high-performance data center workloads don’t actually go through the Linux kernel’s network stack at all.

Instead, they use DPDK, XDP, or userspace stacks like Onload or VMA—often with SmartNICs doing hardware offload. In those cases, this patch wouldn’t apply, since packet processing happens entirely outside the kernel.

That doesn’t mean the patch isn’t valuable—it clearly helps in setups where the kernel is in the datapath (e.g., CDNs, ingress nodes, VMs, embedded Linux systems). But it probably won’t move the needle for workloads that already bypass the kernel for performance or latency reasons. So the 30% power reduction headline is likely very context-dependent.