In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3.

On the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver side there are changes around properly passing the maximum performance value, improved handling in the performance policy mode, cleaning up frequency value calculations, and even some improved hardware p-state (HWP) handling for aging Intel Broadwell processors.

The Intel Idle driver with Linux 7.3 is also now avoiding deep idle states during driver initialization to workaround some device handling issues. There is also now ACPI "_LPI" low power idle object support added to the Intel Idle driver along with Intel driver fixes.

On the AMD P-State driver side there is now dynamic EPP with per-core granularity. The AMD P-State driver also now sets the minimum limit frequency based on the BIOS minimum performance value, fixes some initialization issues, and other updates.

In the power management code there are also Rust binding updates and other changes as outlined in the pull request.

There is also the ACPI pull request that eliminates the acpi_driver struct and brings dozens of fixes to the different areas of the ACPI code.

Lastly from Rafael for the Linux 7.3 merge window were the thermal control updates. Notable there is the support for directed package-level thermal interrupts on Intel CPUs. This efficiency improvement allows one CPU core to handle the package-level thermal interrupts rather than broadcasting to all the CPU cores.