I don't know if we've discussed this or not. Since both CFS and SD claim to be fair, I'd like to hear more opinions on the fairness aspect of these designs. In areas such as OS, networking, and real-time, fairness, and its more general form, proportional fairness, are well-defined terms. In fact, perfect fairness is not feasible since it requires all runnable threads to be running simultaneously and scheduled with infinitesimally small quanta (like a fluid system). So to evaluate if a new scheduling algorithm is fair, the common approach is to take the ideal fair algorithm (often referred to as Generalized Processor Scheduling or GPS) as a reference model and analyze if the new algorithm can achieve a constant error bound (different error metrics also exist). I understand that via experiments we can show a design is reasonably fair in the common case, but IMHO, to claim that a design is fair, there needs to be some kind of formal analysis on the fairness bound, and this bound should be proven to be constant. Even if the bound is not constant, at least this analysis can help us better understand and predict the degree of fairness that users would experience (e.g., would the system be less fair if the number of threads increases? What happens if a large number of threads dynamically join and leave the system?).
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