The long in development work around proxy execution for the Linux kernel appears to be ready for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window with the Single RunQueue Proxy Execution patches queued into a TIP branch after going through 19 rounds of patch review/revisions.
John Stultz of Google has been leading the effort around proxy execution as a kernel mechanism for mutex-owning tasks to inherit the scheduling context of higher priority waiters. Proxy execution for this means of priority inheritance has been sought by Google for Android use to improve the latency in some workloads and more deterministic latency by avoiding priority inversion.
The v19 patch series working on the Single RunQueue Proxy Execution have been queued into TIP.git’s “sched/core” branch. Now having reached this milestone of hitting sched/core it’s likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window. Barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds, this proxy execution support should then premier in Linux 6.17.
The proxy execution feature is gated by the “SCHED_PROXY_EXEC” Kconfig switch and then at boot time is a kernel parameter of “sched_proxy_exec=” to enable/disable proxy execution support.
