Work-conserving scheduler

In computing and communication systems, a work-conserving scheduler is a scheduler that always tries to keep the scheduled resource(s) busy, if there are submitted jobs ready to be scheduled. In contrast, a non-work conserving scheduler is a scheduler that, in some cases, may leave the scheduled resource(s) idle despite the presence of jobs ready to be scheduled.

For example, when dealing with networking and packet scheduling, a work-conserving scheduler leaves the channel idle only when there are no packets to transmit, whereas a non-work conserving one might leave the channel idle also with packets pending to be transmitted.

On the other hand, when referring to CPU scheduling, i.e., threads or processes scheduled over one or more available processors or cores, a work-conserving scheduler ensures that processors/cores are not idle if there are processes/threads ready for execution.

Non-work conserving schedulers are sometimes useful to enhance predictability and reduce termination jitter for the activities carried out by a computing and communication system. In multi-processor systems they're useful to enhance performance in some scenarios. Sometimes, a non-work conserving scheduler may be useful to enhance stability of a system; indeed, one of the issues with the real-time scheduling disciplines SCHED_RR and SCHED_FIFO as standardized by POSIX, was that, while developing and testing a software making use of these disciplines, a bug causing an indefinite loop would entirely freeze a single-processor machine, as no non-real time process would have any chance to be scheduled ever. In order to prevent this to happen, in the Linux kernel the throttling mechanism was added that didn't allow real-time tasks to run for longer than 950ms every second (by default), leaving a minimum of CPU resources to the background OS tasks and other processes like a terminal, so that an operator would still be able to kill the offending real-time process and keep control of the machine if needed.