[melchebo]

The scheduler looking at an idle core decides wether to steal work from an overloaded neighbor. It will only compare over the interconnects in the figure (between domains).

E.g. the the two cores in the dark grey box can steal work from each other. But they will only see load averages of the neighbouring domain. In certain cases the current scheduler calculates the load figures sort of odd, so the idle core decides that a neighboring overloaded 'scheduling domain' is not overloaded.