Lottery scheduler for the Linux kernel

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of Lottery Scheduling, a proportional-share resource management algorithm, on the Linux kernel. A new lottery scheduling class was added to the kernel and was placed between the real-time and the fair scheduling class in the hierarchy of scheduler modules. This work evaluates the scheduler proposed on compute-intensive, I/O-intensive and mixed workloads. The results indicate that the process scheduler is probabilistically fair and prevents starvation. Another conclusion is that the overhead of the implementation is roughly linear in the number of runnable processes.