Con Kolivas Announces First Major Release Of MuQSS, Successor To BFS

At the beginning of the month well-known independent kernel contributor Con Kolivas confirmed he was working on a new project called MuQSS as an evolutionary successor to his Brain F*** Scheduler. This Saturday morning he's now announced the first stable major release of MuQSS.

MuQSS is short for the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler. MuQSS is a drop-in replacement to the BFS scheduler and continues to cater towards responsiveness and interactivity as primary goals for the scheduler.

Kolivas commented on the MuQSS design, "MuQSS is my response for requests for a more scalable version of BFS for our ever-increasing multicore hardware. It is a massive rewrite of BFS designed to maintain the same interactivity and responsiveness using the same algorithm for scheduling decisions, along with a very simple overall design that is easy to understand, model, and hack on, yet able to scale to hardware of virtually any size. It is meant as a replacement for BFS primarily, and NOT a comprehensive replacement for the mainline scheduler since it lacks some of the features of mainline still (specifically cgroups and sched deadline support.) However outside of these feature requirements it performs better in latency and responsiveness areas and, while it performs poorer in some throughput benchmarks."

Early benchmark results for MuQSS are promising and Con acknowledges more optimizations are possible. Similar to BFS, Con Kolivas has no intentions of trying to mainline MuQSS but will continue developing it out-of-tree.

Many more details on this big release of MuQSS can be found via the kernel mailing list.