Last year, the Linux 6.12 kernel was Sched_ext, which enabled the possibilities of an extensible scheduler by implementing the scheduler as EBPF code and allowing it to be dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows you to quickly develop new schedulers and explore other new possibilities for more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others are major supporters of Sched_ext, and Nvidia is increasingly voicing support for these scalable scheduler opportunities.
Nvidia engineer Andrea Righi was in Fosdem in Brussels, Belgium last weekend, giving a speech twice about Sched_ext and the door it opens.
One of the talks by Righi was using Sched_ext in Linux Gaming. In particular, the performance benefits allow Sched_ext to improve performance during the game. As mentioned before, yes, sched_ext can be a big win for Linux games. These presentation assets can be found on this fosdem.org page.
Andrea Righi’s other Fosdem 2025 talks were rusting the Linux kernel scheduler (userspace). The story was about using the Rust programming language to develop the EBPF Sched_ext program on SCX_RUSTLAND. Righi says Rust itself doesn’t make scheduling faster, and SCX_Rustland is not generally a better scheduler, but Rust’s scheduler allows faster experimentation and development development, and more with other userspace components He said it could be well integrated.
