|  | =============== | 
|  | EEVDF Scheduler | 
|  | =============== | 
|  |  | 
|  | The "Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First" (EEVDF) was first introduced | 
|  | in a scientific publication in 1995 [1]. The Linux kernel began | 
|  | transitioning to EEVDF in version 6.6 (as a new option in 2024), moving | 
|  | away from the earlier Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) in favor of a version | 
|  | of EEVDF proposed by Peter Zijlstra in 2023 [2-4]. More information | 
|  | regarding CFS can be found in | 
|  | Documentation/scheduler/sched-design-CFS.rst. | 
|  |  | 
|  | Similarly to CFS, EEVDF aims to distribute CPU time equally among all | 
|  | runnable tasks with the same priority. To do so, it assigns a virtual run | 
|  | time to each task, creating a "lag" value that can be used to determine | 
|  | whether a task has received its fair share of CPU time. In this way, a task | 
|  | with a positive lag is owed CPU time, while a negative lag means the task | 
|  | has exceeded its portion. EEVDF picks tasks with lag greater or equal to | 
|  | zero and calculates a virtual deadline (VD) for each, selecting the task | 
|  | with the earliest VD to execute next. It's important to note that this | 
|  | allows latency-sensitive tasks with shorter time slices to be prioritized, | 
|  | which helps with their responsiveness. | 
|  |  | 
|  | There are ongoing discussions on how to manage lag, especially for sleeping | 
|  | tasks; but at the time of writing EEVDF uses a "decaying" mechanism based | 
|  | on virtual run time (VRT). This prevents tasks from exploiting the system | 
|  | by sleeping briefly to reset their negative lag: when a task sleeps, it | 
|  | remains on the run queue but marked for "deferred dequeue," allowing its | 
|  | lag to decay over VRT. Hence, long-sleeping tasks eventually have their lag | 
|  | reset. Finally, tasks can preempt others if their VD is earlier, and tasks | 
|  | can request specific time slices using the new sched_setattr() system call, | 
|  | which further facilitates the job of latency-sensitive applications. | 
|  |  | 
|  | REFERENCES | 
|  | ========== | 
|  |  | 
|  | [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=805acf7726282721504c8f00575d91ebfd750564 | 
|  |  | 
|  | [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/a79014e6-ea83-b316-1e12-2ae056bda6fa@linux.vnet.ibm.com/ | 
|  |  | 
|  | [3] https://lwn.net/Articles/969062/ | 
|  |  | 
|  | [4] https://lwn.net/Articles/925371/ |