OnePlus is Rumored to Use Energy Aware Scheduling in a Future OnePlus 5 Update

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A lot about how our smartphone performs in regards to both battery life and performance is a consequence of the phone’s kernel. This is a big reason why custom kernels are so popular on XDA, as they can be optimized toward battery life, performance or a balance of both. While the ROM itself and apps you use do have a hand in this as well, it’s the kernel that does a lot of the heavy lifting on our smartphones.

Editor’s Note: The following is strictly a rumor, and it’s quite likely that the device won’t receive EAS for a long time to come. There’s no immediate evidence that the feature is being worked on or that it’ll be released soon, and it has not been incorporated in any OnePlus-provided build across its update channels. Thanks to Mostafa Wael, RenderBroken and joshuous for prompting us to ammend the article with this information.

Aspects of such as the CPU/GPU governor, frequencies, I/O scheduler, voltages and more are all handled by the kernel and they all contribute to how the device performs and how much battery life you can get out of it. OEMs do attempt to make the kernel run as efficiently as possible on a smartphone (to meet their specified target) even though things weren’t created with smartphones in mind. For example, with your typical schedulers, the cpufreq and cpuidle subsystems work in isolation.

This is fine on a desktop PC when battery life isn’t a big deal, but there can be better alternatives. This is where the Energy-Aware Scheduling (EAS) Project comes into play as it tries to resolve this design limitation by coordinating the two key power-management subsystems (CPUFreq and CPUIdle). This is a relatively new project though and this is why we don’t see many OEMs implementing it in the stable build of their kernel code.

OnePlus isn’t afraid to experiment, however. We’ve seen this with the company using the F2FS filesystem on the OnePlus 3T, and they even experimented with turning the display panel upside down in the OnePlus 5. A new rumor from FrAndroid says OnePlus will be updating the OnePlus 5 so it can use Energy Aware Scheduling. This rumor does say that it would enable the device to get 7 hours of screen on time with only using 50% of the battery too, though, which actually sounds quite implausible.

So while the overall rumor may be correct, we think it’s best to take that screen on time claim with a grain of salt.