Open Source Summit Europe 2025

Modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) are designed for a wide range of applications, including mobile devices, automotive systems, AI accelerators, and data servers. As SoCs become more powerful with increasing core counts, heterogeneous architectures, higher clock speeds, and enhanced AI processing capabilities, power consumption also rises. This increased power demand introduces challenges such as heat dissipation, battery life, clock management complexity and system reliability. In this talk, we explore various techniques to optimize power consumption and enhance performance using Common Clock Framework (CCF) in the Linux kernel.

We begin by discussing the role of clock management in Linux and covers various clocking strategies available in CCF to achieve optimal power and performance. Topics include dynamic clock scaling, disabling unused clocks, efficient parent clock selection and the notifier mechanism. We also explore clock usage monitoring in Linux through debugging tools such as clk_summary and kernel tracing.

Overall, this talk demonstrates how effective clocking strategies in the Linux kernel can significantly improve power efficiency and system performance in high-end SoCs.