"As I understand, fair_clock is a monotonously increasing clock which advances at a pace inversely proportional to the load on the runqueue," Srivatsa Vaddagiri explained in a review of Ingo Molnar [interview]'s CFS CPU scheduler [story], "if load = 1 (task), it will advance at same pace as wall clock, as load increases it advances slower than wall clock." He continued on to ask some questions about the choices made in CFS as compared to the EEVDF CPU scheduler [story]. In the resulting discussion, Ingo offered some insight into the design of the CFS. He began:

"80% of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware. 'Ideal multi-tasking CPU' is a (non-existent :-) CPU that has 100% physical power and which can run each task at precise equal speed, in parallel, each at 1/nr_running speed. For example: if there are 2 tasks running then it runs each at 50% physical power - totally in parallel.

"On real hardware, we can run only a single task at once, so while that one task runs the other tasks that are waiting for the CPU are at a disadvantage - the current task gets an unfair amount of CPU time. In CFS this fairness imbalance is expressed and tracked via the per-task p->wait_runtime (nanosec-unit) value. 'wait_runtime' is the amount of time the task should now run on the CPU for it become completely fair and balanced."