Linux Patches Show Promising Results For Lower Latency Of Short Slice Tasks

Linaro engineer Vincent Guittot sent out a set of patches on Friday working on scheduling latency improvements, especially when multiple short slice tasks are running concurrently on the same system.

The set of 18 patches build upon work carried out by Guittot in recent months for addressing different defects in the Linux kernel's scheduler code.

Simply put for end users, using the cyclictest and Hackbench benchmarks for stressing the scheduler, Vincent pulled off some very nice improvements especially around the peak latency observed:

Vincent also noted various other improvements too with these various scheduler improvements that range from implementing decay of positive lag to accounting for the slice when selecting the CPU and other adjustments. Those interested in more data and all the fine details about this work can see all the information in full via the mailing list.