| =============== |
| EEVDF Scheduler |
| =============== |
| |
| The "Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First" (EEVDF) was first introduced |
| in a scientific publication in 1995 [1]. The Linux kernel began |
| transitioning to EEVDF in version 6.6 (as a new option in 2024), moving |
| away from the earlier Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) in favor of a version |
| of EEVDF proposed by Peter Zijlstra in 2023 [2-4]. More information |
| regarding CFS can be found in |
| Documentation/scheduler/sched-design-CFS.rst. |
| |
| Similarly to CFS, EEVDF aims to distribute CPU time equally among all |
| runnable tasks with the same priority. To do so, it assigns a virtual run |
| time to each task, creating a "lag" value that can be used to determine |
| whether a task has received its fair share of CPU time. In this way, a task |
| with a positive lag is owed CPU time, while a negative lag means the task |
| has exceeded its portion. EEVDF picks tasks with lag greater or equal to |
| zero and calculates a virtual deadline (VD) for each, selecting the task |
| with the earliest VD to execute next. It's important to note that this |
| allows latency-sensitive tasks with shorter time slices to be prioritized, |
| which helps with their responsiveness. |
| |
| There are ongoing discussions on how to manage lag, especially for sleeping |
| tasks; but at the time of writing EEVDF uses a "decaying" mechanism based |
| on virtual run time (VRT). This prevents tasks from exploiting the system |
| by sleeping briefly to reset their negative lag: when a task sleeps, it |
| remains on the run queue but marked for "deferred dequeue," allowing its |
| lag to decay over VRT. Hence, long-sleeping tasks eventually have their lag |
| reset. Finally, tasks can preempt others if their VD is earlier, and tasks |
| can request specific time slices using the new sched_setattr() system call, |
| which further facilitates the job of latency-sensitive applications. |
| |
| REFERENCES |
| ========== |
| |
| [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=805acf7726282721504c8f00575d91ebfd750564 |
| |
| [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a79014e6-ea83-b316-1e12-2ae056bda6fa@linux.vnet.ibm.com/ |
| |
| [3] https://lwn.net/Articles/969062/ |
| |
| [4] https://lwn.net/Articles/925371/ |