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Explore the development of arena-based data structures for enhancing scheduler composability in this 17-minute conference talk from the Linux Plumbers Conference. Learn how BPF arenas provide a framework for developing and evolving scheduler abstractions without requiring kernel modifications, addressing current limitations where adding new operations to scheduling primitives requires intensive work and potentially breaks backwards compatibility. Discover the progress on arena-based data structures for rapidly evolving scheduler abstractions including DSQs and CPU topology, and understand how these structures enable writing recursive data structures directly as BPF libraries while lifting restrictions imposed on regular BPF code. Examine alternative DSQ designs, APIs, and implementations for arena-based data structures, including specific instances such as flexible arena-based task queues (ATQs), machine topology representation, and implementations for affinity groups, load balancing, and task stealing. Gain insights into how this approach eliminates the performance costs associated with open-coding functionality in BPF, such as the linear traversal currently required for finding and removing tasks from DSQs.
