LAVD: From Gaming to Server Fleets — a BPF Scheduler for Cloud, ML, and Edge
- Time
- 2026-08-09 10:10 ~ 10:40
- Speaker
- Gavin Guo
- Room
- TR213
- Co-write
Abstract
scx_lavd is a sched_ext scheduler implemented in BPF — dynamically loadable at runtime without a kernel rebuild. It started in 2024 as a Linux gaming experiment for Valve's Steam Deck, and has since matured into a serious contender for server workloads. At Linux Plumbers Conference 2025, Meta engineers presented LAVD as a candidate default scheduler for their server fleet. This session would reveal its core design ideas and how recent development benefits cloud and server workloads — such as the cpu.max cgroup controller, IRQ-aware task steering, latency criticality propagation, and the task-size-aware load balancer. Beyond cloud, the same design supports power-aware mobile/edge deployments and hybrid CPU architectures — making LAVD relevant across cloud, automotive, and mobile vendors.
Speaker
Gavin Guo
Gavin Guo is a Linux kernel engineer at Igalia working on the scheduler subsystem (sched_ext / LAVD) and AI-assisted kernel debugging tooling. Outside the kernel, he builds COCA Dashboard, an open-source MCP-native vocabulary-learning platform combining the Corpus of Contemporary American English with the FSRS-4.5 spaced-repetition algorithm. He has spoken at Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 and Open Source Summit Japan 2025, and previously presented kernel work at LPC and OSPM.