LinSched Advances For Testing The Linux Scheduler

While we are close to seeing the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, this week LinSched for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released. LinSched is a simulator that allows testing the Linux kernel scheduler in user-space for modifying and observing its scheduling behavior.

LinSched is not a new tool, but it comes from the academia world (University of North Carolina) and has since seen adoption by new developers looking to understand the kernel scheduler and is also used by corporations like Google. This new release of LinSched is based upon the Linux 2.6.35 kernel and now supports several additional features of the kernel.

The newly supported features by this user-space program are the kernel's group scheduling, high-resolution timers, a tick-less scheduler, and schedule domain support for all levels. There's also now the ability to specify arbitrary sleep/wake-up patterns for tasks.

The release announcement for the 2.6.35 LinSched can be found on the kernel mailing list.