Stories about: CFS

Despite reassurances from Oracle, advocates of yet another ex-Sun Microsystems technology are voicing concern about the future of their software. In this latest case, the technology is Lustre, a file system widely used across the supercomputing community.

With Wednesday's beta release of its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat has added a number of new capabilities that should help data centers better support virtualization and cloud computing.

The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) was merged for the 2.6.23 kernel. One CFS feature which did not get in, though, was the group scheduling facility. Group scheduling makes the CFS fairness algorithm operate in a hierarchical fashion: processes are divided into groups, and, within each group, processes are scheduled fairly against one another. At the higher level, each group as a whole is given a fair share of the processor. The grouping of processes is done in user space in a highly flexible manner; the control groups (formerly "process containers") mechanism allows a management daemon to classify processes according to almost any policy.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, as the old proverb goes, but who can be flattered by imitation that may violate one's intellectual property?