The 3rd International Workshop on Scheduling and Power Management in the Linux kernel (OSPM Summit) will be held at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa (Italy) on May 20-22 2019.

The event, organized by two professors in embedded systems, Tommaso Cucinotta and Luca Abeni, of the RETIS laboratory of the Institute of Communication, Information and Perception Technologies, aims at summarizing the on-going efforts on scheduling policies in the Linux kernel, able to support real-time performance and reduced energy consumption on next-generation computing platforms, particularly focusing on mobile and heterogeneous ones.

The event is organized in collaboration with Evidence s.r.l., spin-off company of Scuola Sant'Anna, ARM Ltd. and Red Hat, and it will feature talks by the most active groups in the realization of scheduling and power management functionality within the Linux kernel, coming from renown international industrial players such as ARM, Red Hat, Intel, Google, VMWare, Oracle, Linaro, SuSE and IBM.

The Linux kernel is a complex software system under continuous evolution, and it is at the center of the performance of many operating systems based on Linux today, suiting the needs of a wide variety of platforms, from embedded systems for industrial robot control, to workstations, to mobile and multimedia platforms, to web application servers, to infrastructures for cloud, big-data and high-performance computing.

Linux is increasingly used for real-time applications, where the process scheduler plays a key role due to its influence on execution predictability, especially for applications with precise performance and latency constraints.

The RETIS laboratory, with its research activities on scheduling policies for real-time systems, has already contributed to enhancements to the Linux kernel. Indeed, starting from version 3.14, the official kernel integrates SCHED_DEADLINE, result of joint activities of the RETIS laboratory and Evidence s.r.l. in the context of the European project ACTORS. SCHED_DEADLINE allows processes to have scheduling guarantees in the order of milliseconds, thanks to its capability to guarantee temporal isolation among processes contending the access to the CPUs on the system.

The OSPM Sumit will be an excellent opportunity to discuss with the Linux kernel community latest research results and plan possible integration of further energy-aware real-time scheduling functionality in future official versions of the kernel.

For further details, please refer to the workshop web page.