Of the many improvements to be found in the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel — nicely summarized in our Linux 4.17 feature overview — one of the features I’ve been anxious the most to begin benchmarking has been the reported power management improvements. Here are my initial power/performance tests of Linux 4.17 that for some systems is seeing a measurable drop in power usage, even in some cases under load while without sacrificing the performance.

The most promising power management change in Linux 4.17 is a rework of the kernel’s idle loop that may lead to some systems seeing their power drop by up to 10%+.

Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.17-rc1 today and I am looking forward to the power management helping my laptop battery.