The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) is a process scheduler that was merged into the 2.6.23 (October 2007) release of the Linux kernel and is the default scheduler of the tasks of the SCHED_NORMAL class (i.e., tasks that have no real-time execution constraints). It handles CPU resource allocation for executing processes, and aims to maximize overall CPU utilization while also maximizing interactive performance. In contrast to the previous O(1) scheduler used in older Linux 2.6 kernels, which maintained and switched run queues of active and expired tasks, the CFS scheduler implementation is based on per-CPU run queues, whose nodes are time-ordered schedulable entities that are kept sorted by red–black trees. The CFS does away with the old notion of per-priorities fixed time-slices and instead it aims at giving a fair share of CPU time to tasks (or, better, schedulable entities). Algorithm A task (i.e., a synonym for thread) is the minimal entity that Linux can schedule. However, it can also manage groups of threads, whole multi-threaded processes, and even all the processes of a given user. This design leads to the concept of schedulable entities, where tasks are grouped and managed by the scheduler as a whole. For this design to work, each task_struct task descriptor embeds a field of type sched_entity that represents the set of entities the task belongs to. Each per-CPU run-queue of type cfs_rq sorts sched_entity structures in a time-ordered fashion into a red-black tree (or 'rbtree' in Linux lingo), where the leftmost node is occupied by the entity that has received the least slice of execution time (which is saved in the vruntime field of the entity). The nodes are indexed by processor "execution time" in nanoseconds. A "maximum execution time" is also calculated for each process to represent the time the process would have expected to run on an "ideal processor". This is the time the process has been waiting to run, divided by the total number of processes. When the scheduler is invoked to run a new process: The leftmost node of the scheduling tree is chosen (as it will have the lowest spent execution time), and sent for execution. If the process simply completes execution, it is removed from the system and scheduling tree. If the process reaches its maximum execution time or is otherwise stopped (voluntarily or via interrupt) it is reinserted into the scheduling tree based on its newly spent execution