Linux Steal Governor: Tackling CPU Contention on Overcommitted VPS and Cloud Hosts
Virtualization has made it cheap to assign many vCPUs to a guest, but physical hosts have strict limits. When hosting providers overcommit CPU resources, virtual machines can stall while the hypervisor serves another tenant, a phenomenon measured as "steal time." A new Linux kernel proposal called the "steal governor" aims to ease this by dynamically adjusting how a VM schedules work across its vCPUs based on observed steal time. Posted as v11 on August 25, 2026, the patch is targeted for Linux 7.4 but is not yet in stable kernels. For VPS users, cloud architects, and datacenter operators, the feature could soften the noisy neighbor problem—but it is no replacement for careful capacity planning. For a more detailed walkthrough of this part of the topic, read Mailcow VPS Hosting: RAM, Storage and Real Cost . Understanding CPU Steal Time and Overcommitment in Virtualized Hosting In virtualized environments, the operating system inside a guest believes it has a fi...