Schedulers Bundled in Applications?

Posted Jan 31, 2026 17:27 UTC (Sat) by kyouma (subscriber, #181833)
Parent article: Sub-schedulers for sched_ext

Is it possible we will start seeing applications shipping with their own schedulers? It kinda makes sense because developers understand their software better than anyone else. They can ship a default scheduler that makes sense for their application. Users then can customize that further if they have more specific needs.

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Schedulers Bundled in Applications?

Posted Feb 2, 2026 1:22 UTC (Mon) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (1 responses)

If an application really wants to control scheduling, wouldn't it be better to support a usermode scheduling primitive, e.g. Google's SwitchTo?[1] Ideal would be having both options; there's not much overlap regarding how they're used and work.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/22/1202

Schedulers Bundled in Applications?

Posted Feb 2, 2026 10:51 UTC (Mon) by kyouma (subscriber, #181833) [Link]

Thanks for your reply. Didn't know about SwitchTo before.

Indeed for a per-application thing a usermode scheduling primitive is simpler.

`sched_ext` sub-schedulers might make more sense for service-type software like a database. Maybe one can write a NixOS module that declaratively specifies that service X goes with scheduler Y. And enabling the service sets up the scheduler for it.