The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today. If your company is not a member of The Linux Foundation and you are interested in joining please visit our website to learn more about how you can become a Corporate Member.
The increasing focus on power-efficiency in multi-core servers and mobile devices means that it is crucial that the kernel scheduler does its best to balance load across as few active cpus as possible without sacrificing performance. The task load tracking introduced in 3.8 makes it possible to get better estimates of cpu load and individual task load weight. Integrating this with active use of available cpu capacity enables packing of small tasks to minimize wake-ups and better balancing of large tasks.
The main theme is increasing focus on scheduler power awareness among developers in the Linux community. The presentation goes through proposed modifications that extends the use of load tracking and cpu compute capacity, and shares experimental results. Key topics: Packing tasks, minimizing wake-ups, DVFS scaling of compute capacity, and compute capacity driven large task placement.