Linux Kernel Gains Major Boost with Introduction of Steal Governor

The Linux kernel is set to receive a major boost in performance thanks to the introduction of the steal governor, a new feature designed to handle CPU contention in virtualized environments.

The steal governor, developed by IBM engineers, tracks the amount of time a vCPU spends waiting for physical CPU resources and dynamically adjusts the preferred CPU mask to avoid placing tasks on over-committed CPUs or cores that are heavily contended.

This feature is particularly beneficial for workloads where vCPU preemption has significant costs beyond lost CPU time, such as database activities. Shrikanth Hegde of IBM notes that reducing vCPU preemption in these cases can help improve overall system throughput.

Benchmarks conducted by the developers show promising results: Kernbench performance improved up to 14%, Hackbench scheduler benchmark saw gains as high as 44% faster, and Daytrader benchmark wound up as much as 1.53x the baseline performance.