Soon I am going to work as a full-time Haiku developer on enhancing the scheduler. The goal is to improve performance of the whole system and finally deal with some long standing problems. To achieve this CPU affinity will be introduced what would make cache utilization better and I will implement scheduler strategies based on dynamic priorities what, hopefully, would once and for all deal with priority inversion. In addition to that, I want to make scheduler more power-aware. Haiku currently lacks low-level support for some of the more advanced power related features of CPUs but having scheduler ready for would save us from redesigning it later. Also, there are still ways to conserve energy without using the most recent technologies. My first goal is to complete what have been stared by implementing scheduler_affine. Having scheduler that is able to improve cache utilization by trying not to change the CPU thread is executing on may improve system performance. Since the threads are going to be assigned to a certain logical processors appropriate load balancing will have to be introduced. Also, scheduler will need to be aware of the drawbacks of simultaneous multithreading what would allow it to assign threads to logical processors more wisely. That would be even more important because the threads would spend more time on one logical processor.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pawe%C5%82_dziepak/2013-09-07_enhancing_scheduler/