Save the date! P99 CONF 2026 — October 21-22. Call for speakers is open!

SESSION ON-DEMAND

All Things P99

The event for developers who care about P99 percentiles and high-performance, low-latency applications

The Gory Details of a Full-Featured Userspace CPU Scheduler

Userspace CPU schedulers, which often accompany asynchronous I/O engines like io_uring and Linux AIO, are usually simplistic run-to-completion FIFO loops. This suffices for I/O bound applications, but it’s not adequate for use cases that can be both CPU bound and I/O bound.

Avi Kivity, CTO/co-founder of ScyllaDB and co-maintainer of Seastar, will cover the design and implementation of the Seastar userspace CPU scheduler. He will detail what’s required for servicing more complex applications that require preemption and prioritization.

28 minutes
Avi Kivity

Avi Kivity, CTO and Co-Founder of ScyllaDB

Avi Kivity, CTO of ScyllaDB, is known mostly for starting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) project, the hypervisor underlying many production clouds. He has worked for Qumranet and Red Hat as KVM maintainer until December 2012. Avi is now CTO of ScyllaDB, a company that seeks to bring the same kind of innovation to the public cloud space.