EEVDF Scheduler May Be Ready For Landing With Linux 6.6

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra's EEVDF CPU scheduler code to replace the existing Completely Fair Scheduler "CFS" code looks like it will attempt to land with the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window.

For months now Zijlstra has been working on the Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First (EEVDF) scheduler as an approach based on a research paper from the late 90's. With his implementation, Peter has found this EEVDF scheduler to provide for nice latency reductions compared to CFS under different tasks and benchmarks.

Over the summer Peter has indicated that he's ready to begin landing the code and for Linux 6.6 it looks like that will happen.

This week the sched/eevdf branch was created on tip/tip.git. With it working its way to the TIP space, it's likely to then be submitted for the next merge window with Linux 6.6. The sched/eevdf code is in place with that branch plus dropping the old CFS code. Peter commented there, "EEVDF is a better defined scheduling policy, as a result it has less heuristics/tunables. There is no compelling reason to keep CFS around."

So with Linux 6.6 among other shiny new features will hopefully be EEVDF.