June featured an awesome patch series from Will Deacon (who has a future career in stand-up comedy, if the Linux business were to tank for some reason) entitled ‘Remove any correlation between IPC and BogoMips value’. The ‘BogoMips’ value reported by Linux systems is simply a calculation (of the idle loop, during bootup) of how quickly a given processor can do nothing. That is, how quickly calls to no-ops can complete. Many users enjoy quoting BogoMips values, but on modern systems they mean little, and on some systems (especially ARM devices) they mean even less with the introduction of – for example – ARM’s Architected Timers. Newer ARM devices might run at many GHz but report only a few hundred MHz due to the rate of the Architected Timer. Will’s patch included various modes to make BogoMips reflect either reality or marketing desires, including a config option briefly considered to be named CONFIG_MARKETING.