Linux will soon be able to take better advantage of Intel’s newest hybrid processors, adding support for Intel’s Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI).
Beginning with the Alder Lake line of chips, Intel is adopting a hybrid design, feature multiple high-performance and high-efficiency cores. While this type of arrangement is popular in Arm designs, such as those Apple uses throughout its product line, Alder Lake represents the first such design within the x86 world that Intel and AMD dominate.
According to Phoronix, Linux kernel 5.18 will include support for HFI, allowing the operating system (OS) to better utilize the different types of cores for the task at hand. The code has already been integrated into linux-pm’s linux-next branch, with 5.18 stable expected in late May.
Windows 11 already has support for HFI, so the Linux kernel update will bring the same performance gains to the open source OS.