@agx @FrOSCon Great talk! Out of curiosity, do you know what the state of the art is for mobile governors (dynamic frequency scaling) on mainline linux. One of my students has been playing around with Android's governors, and it's looking increasingly like even the defaults (one of which originates from mainline) are over-engineered for the phones we''ve tested on. I don't know what the frequency scaling options look like on the imx8, but there might be some low hanging power savings there.
@agx @FrOSCon What we've been seeing on the snapdragons we've been testing with is that governor policies that adaptively scale CPU frequency are "butting heads" with the idle thread policy. That is, when running the idle thread, it seems like the kernel cuts all power to the core already, so there's not a huge benefit to scaling based on CPU load, which Android's defaults (at least one of which is inherited from linux) are configured to do...
a couple of questions that I couldn't answer just by looking at your slides: you mention no blobs, does that mean GNU Linux-libre or an otherwise cleaned-up kernel like Debian's, or no added blobs on top of those carried by the kernel Linux?
you mention several GNU/Linux distros under alternate approaches, but it wasn't clear whether your approach involved GNU userland, is that the case?
thanks,