Proactive Load Balancing to Reduce Unnecessary Thread Migrations on Chip Multi-Processor (CMP) Systems

For a Linux operating system scheduler that is aware of Chip Multi-Processor (CMP) systems to carry out load balancing is extremely important and quite challenging. The scheduler is a vital component of the Linux kernel responsible for choosing the next thread to run and allocating to a processor core for execution. This process involves primarily a load-balancing procedure that provides the thread migration between the cores of a CMP system. A modern Linux scheduler is designed to obtain the best possible performance while ensuring a fair allocation of the processor cores' time among load-balancing procedure, and therefore, an excessive an increased cache invalidation, scheduling latency, average without degradation of performance.