"Lots of scheduler updates in the past few days, done by many people," noted Ingo Molnar, going on to describe the more significant updates. "Most importantly, the SMP latency problems reported and debugged by Mike Galbraith should be fixed for good now." Ingo noted that the current code base was looking stable and was likely to be merged into the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel, "so please give it a good workout and let us know if there's anything bad going on. (If this works out fine then i'll propagate these changes back into the CFS backport, for wider testing.)" He went on to describe the other main changes in the development branch of the process scheduler:

"I've also included the latest and greatest group-fairness scheduling patch from Srivatsa Vaddagiri, which can now be used without containers as well (in a simplified, each-uid-gets-its-fair-share mode). This feature (CONFIG_FAIR_USER_SCHED) is now default-enabled.

"Peter Zijlstra has been busy enhancing the math of the scheduler: we've got the new 'vslice' forked-task code that should enable snappier shell commands during load while still keeping kbuild workloads in check."

During the recent debates about the Completely Fair Scheduler, Ingo Molnar explained why he rewrote the scheduler, "CFS started out as an experiment to simplify the scheduler, to clean up the after-effects of a better-desktop-scheduling patch Mike Galbraith sent me. Had anyone told me at that time that I'd end up writing a new scheduler I'd have laughed at the suggestion and I'd have pointed to the large number of pending patches of mine in forms of the -rt tree, the syslet/threadlet code and other stuff that needs fixing a lot more urgent than the task scheduler." Regarding the recent debate he added, "there was simply no code in existence before CFS which has proven the code simplicity/design virtues of 'fair scheduling' - SD was more of an argument _against_ it than for it. I think maybe even Con might have been surprised by that simplicity: in his first lkml reaction to CFS he also wrote that he finds the CFS code 'beautiful', and my reply to Con's mail still addresses a good number of points raised in this thread i think." Ingo also described his development style:

"I don't typically write code because I'm particularly 'convinced' about an idea or because I 'believe in' an idea, I mostly write code to _check_ whether an idea is worth advancing or not. Writing code is my form of 'thinking', and releasing patches is my form of telling others about my 'thoughts'. I might have guesses about how well something will work out in practice (and I'd certainly be a fool to go out coding blindly), but surprises happen almost always, both in positive and in negative direction, and even with relatively simple patches."

Ingo Molnar [interview]'s Completely Fair Scheduler [story] has been merged into the Linux kernel for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.23 release. A comment in the patch titled 'sched: cfs core code' noted, "apply the CFS core code. This change switches over the scheduler core to CFS's modular design and makes use of kernel/sched_fair/rt/idletask.c to implement Linux's scheduling policies." Another patch included documentation which described the new scheduler, "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." It goes on to explain:

"CFS's task picking logic is based on this p->wait_runtime value and it is thus very simple: it always tries to run the task with the largest p->wait_runtime value. In other words, CFS tries to run the task with the 'gravest need' for more CPU time. So CFS always tries to split up CPU time between runnable tasks as close to 'ideal multitasking hardware' as possible.

"Most of the rest of CFS's design just falls out of this really simple concept, with a few add-on embellishments like nice levels, multiprocessing and various algorithm variants to recognize sleepers."