Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the “Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler”. He explained, “this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads.” The patchset introduces Scheduling Classes, “an extensible hierarchy of scheduler modules. These modules encapsulate scheduling policy details and are handled by the scheduler core without the core code assuming about them too much.” It also includes sched_fair.c with an implementation of the CFS desktop scheduler, “a replacement for the vanilla scheduler’s SCHED_OTHER interactivity code,” about which Ingo noted, “I’d like to give credit to Con Kolivas for the general approach here: he has proven via RSDL/SD that ‘fair scheduling’ is possible and that it results in better desktop scheduling. Kudos Con!”