Unlike traditional schedulers that only see CPU usage, AnimaLAVD understands what the user is actually interacting with:
- 🖥️ Focused Hyprland window gets immediate CPU priority
- 🎧 Audio workloads stay latency-safe during heavy system load
- 🌐 Optional browser integration boosts the active tab renderer
- ⚡ Rust-powered userspace daemon updates scheduler state in real time
- 🧬 eBPF-backed scheduler decisions without kernel patches
The result: a desktop that stays responsive while gaming, compiling, streaming, or running heavy workloads.
Linux schedulers are excellent at optimizing fairness and throughput.
But they do not know:
"This is the window the user is looking at right now."
A browser tab playing music, a game window, an IDE editor, or a terminal running a command all look like normal processes to the kernel.
AnimaLAVD bridges this gap.
It connects:
User intent
↓
Hyprland focus events
↓
Rust userspace controller
↓
eBPF sched_ext scheduler
↓
CPU scheduling decisions
The scheduler can now prioritize what matters to the user, not just what consumes CPU.
When you switch windows:
Firefox → Terminal → Game
AnimaLAVD instantly updates the active PID list.
The focused application receives a latency boost through the LAVD criticality system.
No:
nicerenice- wrapper scripts
- application-specific hacks
The scheduler handles it directly.
anima-hypr-daemon:
- listens to Hyprland IPC events
- tracks focused windows
- resolves window → PID mappings
- updates pinned BPF maps directly
Implementation:
- Rust
libbpf-rs- direct
bpf()map updates - incremental updates only
No:
bpftoolsubprocess calls- temporary files
- polling loops
- JSON parsing on every event
Future integrations can extend the same mechanism to:
- PipeWire streams
- JACK clients
- game audio threads
- video playback
- VR workloads
The goal:
Background workloads should never destroy interactive latency.
Browsers hide useful information from the scheduler.
A browser extension can expose:
Active tab
↓
Renderer PID
↓
Anima daemon
↓
LAVD boost
Example:
100 browser tabs open
Focused YouTube tab
↓
Only its renderer receives priority
Background tabs remain normal.
Hyprland
|
|
focus events
|
v
anima-hypr-daemon (Rust)
|
|
pinned BPF maps (/sys/fs/bpf)
|
v
scx_lavd-anima
|
v
Linux sched_ext subsystem
|
v
CPU
LAVD already calculates latency criticality based on task behavior.
AnimaLAVD adds one extra signal:
Is this PID currently user-focused?
If yes:
lat_cri = configured focus boost
The focused task enters LAVD's highest latency class.
Default:
ANIMA_BOOST=896
This gives the active application scheduler preference without completely starving background workloads.
AnimaLAVD does not replace LAVD's scheduling logic.
It adds one additional signal:
User attention
Everything else remains upstream LAVD.
Focus changes are rare.
Each update:
- modifies only changed PIDs
- uses direct BPF map operations
- avoids userspace/kernel round trips
If:
- Hyprland stops
- daemon exits
- map is unavailable
The scheduler falls back to normal LAVD behavior.
No permanent priority changes are applied.
- Hyprland focus tracking
- Rust userspace daemon
- eBPF PID priority map
- Runtime boost tuning
- Window tree filtering
- PipeWire latency integration
- Browser extension PID bridge
- Game launcher integration
- Per-application profiles
AnimaLAVD is an experiment in human-aware scheduling.
Traditional schedulers optimize:
CPU utilization
fairness
throughput
AnimaLAVD adds:
human attention
interaction latency
desktop responsiveness
The computer should prioritize what the user is doing — not what happens to be consuming the most CPU.