The scheduler was originally developed to prevent dropped frames on Valve's Steam Deck
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(Image credit: Valve/Meta) Share Share by: Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google When Meta went looking for a better Linux CPU scheduler for its massive server fleet, it didn't start in the data center. Instead, it started with a handheld gaming PC. In a recent technical talk at the Linux Plumbers' Conference in Tokyo, Meta engineers detailed how they've been deploying SCX-LAVD, a low-latency Linux scheduler originally developed by Valve for the Steam Deck, across production servers running everything from messaging backends to caching services. The surprising conclusion: a scheduler designed to keep games responsive under load turns out to be an excellent fit for large-scale data center workloads , too.
At a high level, a CPU scheduler decides which programs get to run on what CPU cores, and when. Linux's default scheduler has to work everywhere — phones, laptops, desktops, servers — which makes it extremely conservative. Meta's challenge is different: it runs enormous machines with hundreds of CPU cores, wildly varied workloads, and most critically, strict latency targets. In that environment, "good enough everywhere" often isn't good enough. Rather than building a custom scheduler for every service, Meta wanted something closer to a fleet-wide default, a "one size fits most" scheduler that could adapt automatically without hand-tuned configuration. That's where SCX-LAVD came in.
SCX-LAVD is built on sched_ext, a relatively new Linux framework that enables alternative schedulers to plug into the kernel without significant kernel modification. In simple terms, sched_ext lets companies experiment with different scheduling strategies safely and incrementally, instead of forking Linux or maintaining massive patch sets.
ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-deploys-the-steam-decks-linux-scheduler-across-its-data-centers-valves-low-latency-scheduler-perfect-for-managing-metas-workloads-at-massive-data-centers#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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