19 May 2022
I was looking at my top command to try and find out what was eating all my CPU cycles and I found out about a cool module called intel_powerclamp.
When the CPU is getting warm, intel_powerclamp intervenes by spawning kidle-inject processes. These appear to use a heck of a lot of CPU time (~25-50%!) and I decided to find out what it does.
Turns out these appear to use all that CPU time telling the processor to not do work to try and force the CPU to cool down. It's actually a really cool trick to force the CPU to cool down and I decided to leave it on because in my opinion, I'd prefer my laptop to be slower than die young.