Released on Friday was the newest version of Intel Thermald, the thermal daemon developed by Intel for their processors on Linux for monitoring and helping control temperatures across modern Intel-powered laptops and desktops. Catching me immediately by surprise was Intel Thermald 2.5.12 introducing support for ARM.

The release of Intel Thermald 2.5.12 yesterday immediately caught my surprise when seeing ARM support... This daemon has been only for Intel hardware to date and not even for AMD x86_64 CPUs. When digging into the ARM support, it's ultimately as a result of the open-source way. A Qualcomm engineer working on Linux thermal management for Qualcomm SoCs ultimately took to refactoring Thermald to support non-Intel platforms. A platform-agnostic back-end was added to Intel Thermald to better compartmentalize the code. Rather than forking Intel Thermald and making their own project catered to their ARM SoCs, Qualcomm is refactoring it and extending it. Well, some at Intel might not be happy about their open-source project now benefiting their competitors in the laptop space.

Amit Kucheria who is Qualcomm's Director of Engineering and focused on the upstream Linux support for their SoCs then got involved in the discussion and confirming their intent on testing Thermald changes moving forward for ARM given the Intel engineers being unable to test the ARM device changes. So this indeed seems to be an official Qualcomm push to leverage to Intel Thermald on Linux moving forward. This Qualcomm Linux thread going back to last year also details their intent on adapting and using Intel Thermald for their own hardware.

Outside of the ARM platform work, Intel Thermald 2.5.12 adds more CPU IDs for Nova Lake variants, the adaptive mode is now exclusively used for Nova Lake and newer Intel CPUs, improved RAPL handling, security hardening to the codebase, and a variety of other code clean-ups throughout this Linux daemon.

Intel Thermald 2.5.12 can be downloaded from GitHub.