Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others have been big proponents of sched_ext and NVIDIA is also increasingly vocalizing their support for these extensible scheduler opportunities.
NVIDIA engineer Andrea Righi was at FOSDEM last weekend in Brussels, Belgium with two talks around sched_ext and the doors it opens.
One of the talks by Righi was on sched_ext use for Linux gaming. In particular, the performance benefits that sched_ext can allow for increased performance while gaming. As previously talked about, yes, sched_ext can be a big win for Linux gaming. Those presentation assets can be found via this FOSDEM.org page.
Andrea Righi’s other FOSDEM 2025 talk was Rust-ifying the Linux kernel scheduler (in user space). That talk was on using the Rust programming language for developing eBPF sched_ext programs with scx_rustland. Righi noted there that Rust itself doesn’t make the scheduling fast and scx_rustland isn’t a better scheduler in general, but schedulers in Rust can make for faster experimentation and easier development as well as integrating better with other user-space components.
