{"id":210671,"date":"2026-02-06T09:59:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T14:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/06\/kubernetes-could-use-a-different-linux-scheduler\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T10:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T15:30:09","slug":"kubernetes-could-use-a-different-linux-scheduler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/06\/kubernetes-could-use-a-different-linux-scheduler\/","title":{"rendered":"Kubernetes Could Use a Different Linux Scheduler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kubernetes Could Use a Different Linux Scheduler<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/cloudnativenow.com\/features\/kubernetes-could-use-a-different-linux-scheduler\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-06 09:59:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: cloudnativenow.com<\/a><\/p>\n

A pair of Cambridge researchers have found a way to squeeze 10 \u2013 20% more capacity from Kubernetes clusters, simply by making a tweak in the way the Linux kernel schedules jobs.<\/p>\n

During a talk at FOSDEM, University of Cambridge Professor Richard Mortier described the work, the bulk of which he admitted was completed by his graduate student Al Amjad Tawfiq Isstaif, who couldn\u2019t make the conference.<\/p>\n

The research came about in trying to understand why Kubernetes clusters were not running as efficiently on the hardware as they could be.<\/p>\n

In short, they found that the built-in Linux scheduler is ill-suited to run Kubernetes jobs, especially serverless tasks. By changing the scheduling algorithm to one more suited for completing many short-running tasks, the researchers increased the utilization of CPUs.<\/p>\n

CFS is Not Always \u2018Fair\u2019<\/h3>\n

These days, we expect a modern processor to juggle multiple tasks on behalf of the operating system. How does it choose which jobs to execute? That\u2019s the job of the OS scheduler.<\/p>\n

For Linux, this is currently the role of the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS), first implemented in Linux 2.6.23 in 2007. When it was added, Linux was (and is) widely used for running web servers, themselves sets of long-running daemons.<\/p>\n

The scheduler relies heavily on cgroups to bunch together the many different types of jobs it has to run. Cgroups is the Linux kernel feature that provides a way to set resource utilization limits \u2014 for CPU shares-per-process, as well as memory, I\/O, and network resources for each group. A cgroup can bundle multiple tasks, each one run from a container on the pod.<\/p>\n

CFS\u2019 own idea of fairness comes down to a single rule: Prioritize the task that has thus far been executed the least. This way, it minimizes the wait time as much as possible for all jobs.<\/p>\n

Fair right?<\/p>\n

Kubernetes jobs tend more densely packed together than the LAMP stack of yore, though. The appeal of Kubernetes is, after all, to quickly spin up…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kubernetes Could Use a Different Linux Scheduler https:\/\/cloudnativenow.com\/features\/kubernetes-could-use-a-different-linux-scheduler\/ Publish Date: 2026-02-06 09:59:00 Source Domain: cloudnativenow.com…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":210672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cloudnativenow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/canstockphoto36583007.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-210671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210673,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210671\/revisions\/210673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}