Intel SST Core-Power Support Ready For Linux 5.6

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6.

While Intel Speed Select Technology support was added to Linux last year as one of the new features with Cascade Lake, the "Core-Power" (or SST-CP) profile hadn't been wired up in full to this point. Intel SST-CP allows for dealing with per-core priorities when encountering power constraints.

Intel SST—Core power (CP or core-power):
An Interface that allows user to define per core priority. This defines a mechanism to distribute power among cores when there is a power constrained scenario. This defines a class of service configuration. Each CPU core can be tied to a class of service and hence an associated priority.

These patches, what were talked about earlier in January, are now queued in linux-platform-drivers-x86's for-next branch making the SST-CP support material slated to land in Linux 5.6. The Linux 5.6 kernel should in turn be released as stable in April.