A typical data center rack holds about 40 servers, each with at least two networking interfaces. According to Boote, the Ethernet interfaces of a single rack draw 160 watts in total.

“Reducing the power draw of a data center, which may have hundreds or thousands of racks, would be akin to an energy savings of switching a building from incandescent to more energy efficient LED lighting and be well worth the investment,” he told LinuxInsider.

According to Boote, this optimization fixes a part of the kernel written when lower-speed Ethernet interfaces drew a fraction of today’s electrical needs. The networking stack design did not account for the growing power budget required by modern networking interfaces.

“By changing the priority of how the computers schedule tasks during high bandwidth events, a computer can better deal with networking traffic and prioritize energy expenditure in a way that makes sense for modern hardware and architectures,” he reasoned.