VOOZH about

URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fair-DRM-Scheduler-v5

⇱ Fair DRM Scheduler Looking Good For Better Fairness & Scheduling Of GPU Clients - Phoronix


👁 Phoronix

Fair DRM Scheduler Looking Good For Better Fairness & Scheduling Of GPU Clients

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 23 June 2025 at 08:55 AM EDT. 12 Comments
Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources.

The DRM scheduler is currently used by multiple Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers for what originally began as just the AMDGPU scheduler. Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the effort on a Fair DRM scheduler for better fairness and scheduling heuristics around multiple interacrive clients running in parallel for heavy GPU workloads.

The emphasis with the DRM Fair Scheduler continues to be on better scheduling than the existing FIFO behavior to avoud priority starvation, making the DRM scheduler code simpler, and all-around better behavior than the status quo.

Posted today to the dri-devel mailing list was the v5 patch series for the DRM Fair Scheduler. Additionally, Tvrtko Ursulin has posted to the Igalia blog with more details on this scheduler work.

Tvrtko concludes in his Igalia blog post:
"From all the above it appears that the experiment was successful. We were able to simplify the code base, solve the priority starvation and improve scheduling fairness and GPU time allocation for interactive clients. No scheduling regressions have been identified to date."

The code remains under review but will hopefully work its way to the mainline kernel soon.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.