PRF-201 · Performance Engineering · Advanced
CPU & Scheduler Tuning — full syllabus
Getting the scheduler out of your way: placement, priorities, frequency scaling and isolation.
Duration3 full days in person · 6 half-days online
Cohortmax 14 in person · 20 online
Pricefrom SAR 9,000 in person · local pricing per city
Delivery35% principles · 20% guided investigation · 45% engineering studio
Who this course is for
Platform and performance engineers responsible for latency-sensitive or throughput-critical services on shared Linux hosts — who need the scheduler working for them, not against them.
Prerequisites
- Comfort with Linux administration
- PRF-101 or equivalent method (recommended)
- Ability to read C helpful for guided kernel-source reading
Course outline
Day 1 — The scheduler as a measurable system
- CFS/EEVDF essentials: vruntime, weights and what fairness costs
- Run queue latency: what it is and how to measure it with perf sched and runqlat
- Context switches, migrations and wakeups: reading sched tracepoints
- CPU utilisation vs the workload's actual demand
- Diagnosing CPU saturation that top hides
Day 2 — Placement and policy
- Affinity with taskset and sched_setaffinity; what pinning buys and what it breaks
- cpusets and cgroup v2 CPU controls: cpu.max, cpuset, weight
- NUMA-aware launch with numactl: node binding, interleave, first-touch policy
- Scheduling policies for latency-sensitive work: SCHED_FIFO, SCHED_RR, SCHED_DEADLINE and their failure modes
- Nice, priorities and why they rarely do what people expect
Day 3 — Frequency, isolation and interference
- CPU frequency governors, intel_pstate/amd_pstate, turbo and their latency cost
- Measuring frequency behaviour and its effect on tail latency
- CPU isolation: isolcpus, nohz_full, rcu_nocbs and what remains on the isolated core
- Diagnosing throttling: thermal, power and cgroup bandwidth throttling
- Noisy neighbours: finding them with counters and containing them with cpusets and cgroups
Hands-on labs
- Lab: measure run queue latency with perf sched and BCC runqlat on a loaded system and explain the distribution
- Lab: place a workload with taskset and numactl; prove (or disprove) the NUMA-locality win with counters
- Lab: sweep frequency governors on a latency-sensitive loop and measure the tail-latency cost of each
- Lab: demonstrate a noisy-neighbour collapse, then contain it with cpusets and cgroup v2 CPU limits and re-measure
- Lab: isolate a core with isolcpus/nohz_full, run an RT-priority workload on it and quantify the jitter reduction
Capstone project
Tune a latency-sensitive service on a contended host: characterise the interference with scheduler tracepoints and run-queue measurements, apply a defensible combination of placement, policy, frequency and isolation changes, and deliver before/after latency distributions with every change tied to the measurement that justified it — plus the rollback plan for each change.
What you leave with
- Run-queue and scheduler-latency measurement skills (perf sched, runqlat, sched tracepoints)
- A placement and policy toolkit: affinity, cpusets, numactl, RT policies
- Evidence on what governors and turbo actually do to your tail latency
- A working isolation and noisy-neighbour containment routine
- A change log format that pairs every tunable with its justifying measurement
Upcoming dates
| Dates | Where | Seats | Early bird | Regular | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Nov – 24 Nov 20263 full days | RiyadhIn person · KAFD Conference Centre | 5 of 14 | SAR 8,100until 23 Oct | ||
| 22 Nov – 24 Nov 20263 full days | Kuwait CityIn person · Al Hamra Tower | 10 of 14 | KWD 670until 23 Oct | ||
| 29 Nov – 1 Dec 20263 full days | MuscatIn person · Knowledge Oasis Muscat | 5 of 14 | OMR 830until 30 Oct | ||
| 6 Dec – 13 Dec 20266 half-days | Gulf bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 GMT+3 | 13 of 20 | US$1,580until 6 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 9 Dec 20263 full days | OttawaIn person · Kanata North Tech Park | 10 of 14 | CAD 2,930until 7 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 9 Dec 20263 full days | TorontoIn person · MaRS Discovery District | 5 of 14 | CAD 2,930until 7 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 14 Dec 20266 half-days | Europe bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 CET | 18 of 20 | US$1,580until 7 Nov | ||
| 14 Dec – 16 Dec 20263 full days | LondonIn person · Shoreditch Works | 10 of 14 | GBP 1,680until 14 Nov | ||
| 14 Dec – 21 Dec 20266 half-days | Americas bandLive online · 13:00–17:00 ET | 7 of 20 | US$1,580until 14 Nov | ||
| 21 Dec – 23 Dec 20263 full days | BerlinIn person · Factory Görlitzer Park | 5 of 14 | EUR 1,990until 21 Nov |
Book a seat, or bring this course to your team
Seats can be reserved online; private delivery runs on-site or live online, adapted to your stack.
Questions about fit or prerequisites? Email hello@kernelsystems.academy. To save this syllabus, print this page to PDF from your browser.