Changes/ThermalManagementWS

Better Thermal Management for the Workstation

Summary

Better thermal management and peak performance on Intel CPUs by including thermald in the default install.

Owner

• Name: Benjamin Berg
• Email: bberg@redhat.com

• Name: Christian J. Kellner
• Email: ckellner@redhat.com

• Product: Workstation
• Responsible WG: Workstation

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 31
• Last updated: 2019-07-31
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Modern Intel-based systems provide sensors and methods to monitor and control temperature of its CPUs. The Thermal daemon will use those sensors to monitor the temperature and use the best available method to keep the CPU in the right temperature envelop. On certain systems this is needed to reach the maximal performance. For optimal performance a per-model thermald configuration should be created, this can either be done by using dptfxtract (available from rpmfusion) or we could ship static configuration files for a set of known models.

For a more details explanation please consult Intel's introduction to thermald.

Benefit to Fedora

Better out-of-the-box experience due to improved cooling methods and performance on Intel systems.

Scope

• Proposal owners:

- Include the thermald package in the default Workstation install
- Optionally provide patches for thermald to be able to read hardware specific configuration data
- Optionally collect hardware specific configuration data and ship it

• Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Release engineering:
• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

How To Test

Install the packages and use e.g. turbostat to monitor the performance. Improvements may only be visible if the non-free dptfxtract package is also installed.

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

User Experience

- Better performance on certain hardware
- Better cooling of CPUs on certain hardware

Dependencies

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Don't ship package by default
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks product? product

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)