Scheduler activations for interference-resilient SMP virtual machine scheduling
Yong Bo Zhao, Kun Suo, Luwei Cheng, Jia Rao · 2017
The wide adoption of SMP virtual machines (VMs) and resource consolidation present challenges to efficiently executing multi-threaded programs in the cloud. An important problem is the semantic gaps between the guest OS and the hypervisor. The well-known lock-holder preemption (LHP) and lock-waiter preemption (LWP) problems are examples of such semantic gaps, in which the hypervisor is unaware of the activities in the guest OS and adversely deschedules virtual CPUs (vCPUs) that are executing in critical sections. Existing studies have focused on inferring a high-level semantic state of the guest OS to aid hypervisor-level scheduling so as to avoid the LHP and LWP problems.