Hypervisor Scheduler Enhancement Using OS-Hardware Interactions

As the hypervisor has become a common software layer in conventional software stack and applications are continuously diversifying, computing environments have now undergone increasing gap between end-user software and underlying hardware. In particular, the design principle of lightweight hypervisor causes a blockage to information flow while granting the workload-agnostic hypervisor the entire control of bare-metal hardware resources. The blockage leads the hypervisor to ineffective decisions about CPU resource scheduling, which is a primitive role of arbitrating the competing demands of workload executions, due to the lack of workload information. In this talk, I present two CPU scheduling approaches devised to improve the performance of consolidated workloads using common OS-hardware interactions: 1) Demand-based coordinated scheduling for SMP VMs, and 2) task-aware scheduling for I/O-intensive and interactive workloads.
Firstly, the demand-based coordinated scheduling addresses scheduling issues arising when communication-intensive workloads are hosted on multiprocessor VMs, which share underlying multi-core processors. Inspired by the demand-based coscheduling demonstrated in cluster environments, I devised an SMP VM scheduling scheme that dynamically coordinates vCPUs based on their communication (i.e., inter-processor interrupt). Secondly, task-aware VM scheduling makes a task-oblivious hypervisor scheduler aware of task-level characteristics such as I/O-boundness and user interactivity. To this end, I devised several inference techniques based on per-task CPU time and I/O events that can be captured by OS-hardware interactions.

Speaker Details

Hwanju Kim received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from KAIST in 2013 and his B.S in Information and Computer Engineering from Ajou University in 2006. His research interests are in the area of computer systems with the particular focus on efficient resource management of operating systems and hypervisors. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Computer System Laboratory in Sungkyunkwan University. Details about his research activities can be found in http://calab.kaist.ac.kr/~hjukim.

Date:
Speakers:
Hwanju Kim
Affiliation:
KAIST
    • Portrait of Casey Anderson

      Casey Anderson