Ingo Molnar announced that version 24 of his Completely Fair Scheduler patch is now available backported to the 2.6.24-rc3, 2.6.23.8, 2.6.22.13, and 2.6.21.7 kernels. He noted that there have been significant changes since the last backport, "36 files changed, 2359 insertions(+), 1082 deletions(-). That's 187 individual commits from 32 authors." Ingo noted, "99% of these changes are already upstream in Linus's git tree and they will be released as part of v2.6.24. (there are 4 pending commits that are in the small 2.6.24-rc3-v24 patch.)" He also highlighted some of the more significant improvements:

"Improved interactivity via Peter Ziljstra's 'virtual slices' feature. As load increases, the scheduler shortens the virtual timeslices that tasks get, so that applications observe the same constant latency for getting on the CPU. (This goes on until the slices reach a minimum granularity value).

"CONFIG_FAIR_USER_SCHED is now available across all backported kernels and the per user weights are configurable via /sys/kernel/uids/. Group scheduling got refined all around."