Saving frequency scaling in the data center

Frequency scaling — adjusting a CPU's operating frequency to save power when the workload demands are low — is common practice across systems supported by Linux. It is, however, viewed with some suspicion in data-center settings, where power consumption is less of a concern and there is a strong emphasis on getting the most performance out of the hardware. At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), Giovanni Gherdovich worried that frequency scaling may be about to go extinct in data centers; he made a plea for improving its behavior for such workloads while there is still time.

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