Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

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On 2014-04-01 03:11, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
>=20
> 1. Power.  As you point out, being truly power efficient is a complete =
top-to-bottom engineering effort and it takes a lot more than just trying=
 to idle the processor whenever possible to achieve that.  You need to op=
timize all of the hot-spot routines in the system for power efficiency (w=
hich actually involves a fair amount of micro architecture knowledge), yo=
u need a kernel scheduler that is power management aware, you need a proc=
ess management system that runs as few things as possible and knows how t=
o schedule things during package wake-up intervals, you need timers to be=
 coalesced at the level where applications consume them, the list just go=
es on and on.  It=92s a lot of engineering work, and to drive that work y=
ou also need a lot of telemetry data and people with big sticks running a=
round hitting people who write power-inefficient code.  FreeBSD has neith=
er.
>=20

There is some advantage to focusing on power in the Server and Embedded
space. Saving power in a rack full of machines would be a very big win,
and it could be especially important in embedded.

As Jordan mentions, a kernel scheduler that is aware of power management
could do big things here. It may also be able to provide a performance
boost, Intel's TurboBoost feature is controlled via power management,
and only lights off under specific circumstances, unlocking that extra
performance at key times may also be a big win.

>=20
> - Jordan
>=20
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> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscribe@freebsd.o=
rg"
>=20

--=20
Allan Jude

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