Linux machines have been plagued by Windows-centric hardware management since 2002, but that could be about to change.
Sophisticated interfaces between a machine's operating system and its hardware, like the chips that slow down your Linux machine, have long been needed to ensure that processors with billions of transistors remain efficient.
Although the latest ACPI standard replaced the outgoing APM standard in 1996, but still more than a quarter of a century ago, it still had a major flaw.
slower performance
Computer engineers do most of their testing on the industry standard operating system, which has long been Windows, making Linux and macOS distributions virtually unthinkable when using third-party chips like AMD processors.
With the introduction of its own silicon, Apple found a way to improve overall performance with the processors it uses in its computers. The company's M-series chips are now in their second generation, though it's an expensive solution that's simply out of reach for the Linux Foundation.
Poor Linux performance
The report goes on to recall the thoughts of Linux creator Linus Torvalds regarding the updated ACPI standard, when he said in 2003:
"ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with that. If the folks at Intel are hearing this and you have anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before we reproduce this.
The problem arose when problem machines took a while to respond to STPCLK# signals, which determine whether a core should be idle. This led to a reduction in power efficiency, which led to the introduction of some dummy I/O instructions as a workaround.
Although this is no longer an issue, AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak discovered that Linux machines still follow the dummy instructions on his company's processors. Meanwhile, The Register is reporting an "initial patch" by Intel's Dave Hansen, which limits the fix to only be present in Intel chips, which won't be affected due to the different method they use to slow down a heart. As a result, the minimum flow would have increased by about 14 times, and the average flow would also have increased by a little more than half.
Ultimately, even as we enter the 2020s, much of the third-party hardware we see on the market continues to be developed primarily with Windows in mind, and Eagle-Eyed engineering tweaks will likely continue to improve for the less popular. operating systems over time.
Via The Register (Opens in a new tab)