In a June of 1992 posting to the linux-activists mailing list, Linus Torvalds described the original Linux scheduler noting, "the scheduler in linux is pretty simple, but does a reasonably good job at giving good IO response while not being too unfair against cpu-bound processes." A year later, Linus posted a more detailed description of the scheduler noting, "the linux scheduling algorithm is one of the simplest ones possible". Comments in the original 254 line sched.c file read, "'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). The one thing you might take a look at is the signal-handler code here."

Comments in the current 6,709 line sched.c file show the first changes being made in 1996 by Dave Grothe, "to fix bugs in semaphores and make semaphores SMP safe". Two years later Andrea Arcangeli is credited with implementing "schedule_timeout() and related stuff". It was not until 2002, ten years after Linus' original code was written, that the scheduler received a complete rewrite, "new ultra-scalable O(1) scheduler by Ingo Molnar: hybrid priority-list and round-robin design with an array-switch method of distributing timeslices and per-CPU runqueues." Con Kolivas is credited with "interactivity tuning" in 2003, and Nick Piggin added "scheduler domains" in 2004. A more recent rewrite of the scheduler happened in April, again by Ingo Molnar, this time with his Completely Fair Scheduler.