A VM-aware fairness scheduler on heterogenous multi-core platforms
Chi‐Sheng Shih, Jie-Wen Wei, Shih‐Hao Hung, Norman Chang, Joen Chen · 2012
Heterogeneous multi-core processors are now widely deployed to meet computation requirements for multimedia applications on embedded mobile devices. However, due to the difference on computation capability of heterogeneous multi-cores, it is challenging to share the load among cores and to better utilize the cores on the processor. In this work, we develop a fairness scheduler to share the load among cores to meet the above challenge. The developed framework ensures that each virtual machine receives its proportional share of computation time over different processing elements. To fairly schedule the tasks on the platform, VM-aware fair scheduler (VMAFS) takes into account the preemptibility of processes on co-processors. We define fairness on such architectures and use this metric to efficiently drive VMAFS-N so as to fairly manage non-preemptive computing resources. Performance evaluations result show that when VMAFS-N algorithm is used, scheduling fairness is not sensitive to the amount of computation time of non-preemptive tasks. In addition, VMAFS-N algorithm greatly outperforms credit-based scheduling algorithm, which is deployed in existing virtualization environment.