Solaris on Nehalem

With the announcement of Intel Nehalem support in Solaris, we pointed to some interesting features, but from my perspective the power-aware dispatcher is the most interesting one. I wrote a while ago about the turbo boost feature of the Nehalem processors. The processor overclocks itself, when there is still head room in the power and thermal budget. It can overclock a core even higher, when other cores are in deep sleep. Otherwise it can make sense not to use a core for a single process, when there is enough compute power available otherwise you could put this core into a deep sleep mode just to save power. The new power-aware dispatcher in Solaris is aware of this side conditions and can dispatch the processes in a System accordingly. You will find more informations at the projects website.