What's a CPU to do when it has nothing to do?
What's a CPU to do when it has nothing to do?
[Kernel] Posted Oct 5, 2018 19:22 UTC (Fri) by madhatter
It would be reasonable to expect doing nothing to be an easy, simple task for a kernel, but it isn't. At Kernel Recipes 2018, Rafael Wysocki discussed what CPUs do when they don't have anything to do, how the kernel handles this, problems inherent in the current strategy, and how his recent rework of the kernel's idle loop has improved power consumption on systems that aren't doing anything.