Your Cores Are Slacking Off—Or Why OS Scheduling Is a Hard Problem
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
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As a central component of resource management, the OS thread scheduler must make sure that ready threads are scheduled on available cores. As surprising as it may seem, we found that this simple rule is often broken in Linux. Cores may stay idle for seconds while ready threads are waiting in run queues, delaying applications and wasting energy. This phenomenon is not due to an intentional design but to performance bugs. These bugs can slow down scientific applications many-fold and degrade performance of workloads like kernel compilation and OLAP on a widely used commercial database by tens of percent, particularly on machines with a large number of cores. The root cause of the bugs is the increasing scheduler complexity, linked to rapid evolution in modern hardware. In this article, we describe the bugs and their effects and reflect on ways to combat them.
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