System76-Scheduler 2.0 Released With PipeWire Integration, Performance Optimizations

Last year the Pop!_OS software developers at System76 introduced system76-scheduler as a Rust-written user-space daemon intended to auto-configure CFS and dynamically manage process priorities. They've added various features to improve the Linux desktop responsiveness and performance while today they rolled out system76-scheduler v2.0 as the latest iteration of this process scheduler.

The last release to system76-scheduler was back in May 2022 and since then, frankly, I had largely forgotten about it with all their other Pop!_OS work like developing their new COSMIC desktop as well as interesting hardware endeavors like the HP Dev One and now even prototyping their own in-house laptop design. But out today is system76-scheduler 2.0 as a big update to this open-source project.

System76-Scheduler 2.0 brings PipeWire integration so it can auto-assign and set higher priorities to processes connected to PipeWire -- since for most tasks interfacing with this audio/video stream server will want to be higher priority for the best desktop experience.

System76-Scheduler 2.0 also brings "many" performance optimizations like eliminating most memory allocations by reusing buffers for reading files / building paths as well as voiding UTF-8 string checks when not necessary.

The updated system76-scheduler also disables the kernel's auto-group feature by default, supports new scheduler policies like FIFO and IDLE, the process scheduler service functionality can now be disabled, and a variety of other improvements.

Downloads and more details on today's System76-Scheduler 2.0 release via GitHub.