Con Kolivas Revives "-ck" Patches & MuQSS To Improve Linux Desktop Responsiveness

Con Kolivas has revived his -ck patchset, which aims to enhance desktop and mobile device responsiveness, interactivity, and gaming performance. The patchset primarily replaces the CPU scheduler with EEVDF, configurable runqueue sharing, and MultiQueue Skiplist Scheduler. It has been ten years since Kolivas originally abandoned the patchset due to time constraints, but the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made merging and development much more straightforward.

Since the last publicly announced release, numerous features have been added to the patchset, including I/O aware CPU scheduling, Kthread work accounting, P/E core aware load balancing, skiplist structure size minimisation, and micro-optimizations. The patchset has also undergone a "mother of all resyncs" to bring it up to date with Linux kernel version 7.2. Additionally, a multitude of bugfixes have been implemented.

Michael Larabel, the principal author of Phoronix.com and a long-time contributor to Linux hardware support, performance, graphics drivers, and other topics, is the lead developer of the -ck patchset. Phoronix.com was founded in 2004 and has since published over 20,000 articles on Linux hardware, performance, and benchmarking. Larabel can be reached via Twitter, LinkedIn, or through his personal website, MichaelLarabel.com.