The cpuidle subsystem

Good article that describes the subsystem that silently saves power and extends battery life on laptops. This subsystem is also useful on servers that support multiple low power idle states.

The cpuidle subsystem is being ported to other architectures as well, however as mentioned by our editor the complexity of the subsystem poses some challenges for a clean multi architecture implementation.

Reference:
[1] cpuidle for POWER (patch v12)
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/4/15/190

[2] Discussions and previous patches
http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/12/2/98