Talk Changwoo Min

Abstract: 
Gaming on Linux has undergone a massive transformation, with platforms like SteamOS now running high-end titles seamlessly. However, a premium gaming experience requires more than high average frame rates; it demands the elimination of "stutter"—the micro-latencies and sudden FPS drops that break immersion. On handheld, battery-constrained devices, the challenge is even steeper: balancing peak responsiveness with aggressive power efficiency. Meeting these demands requires a departure from traditional throughput-oriented scheduling toward a more nuanced, latency-aware approach.

This talk explores how the Linux scheduler directly impacts these critical metrics. We dive into LAVD, a latency-aware scheduler engineered to minimize jitters and optimize the power-performance tradeoff. We will examine the core scheduling techniques that allow LAVD to prioritize interactivity without sacrificing throughput. Finally, we discuss the cross-domain application of these policies: how LAVD’s latency-focused design scales to large server workloads, the unique challenges of high-core-count environments, and the solutions for maintaining tail latency at scale.

Bio: 
Changwoo Min is a Kernel Developer at Igalia, an employee-owned open-source consultancy. His work focuses on researching and developing operating system enhancements for performance, concurrency, and security. Currently, he is specialized in improving Linux scheduler interactivity for latency-critical tasks. Before joining Igalia, he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech. He received a Faculty Fellow Award from the College of Engineering at
Virginia Tech in 2022. Before joining Virginia Tech in 2017, he was a research scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. degree from Sungkyunkwan University in 2014. Before starting his Ph.D. study, he developed various software products, including a Linux-based mobile platform (Tizen), Java virtual machine (J9), and desktop operating system (OS/2) in Samsung Electronics and IBM.