A real-time scheduling framework based on multi-core dynamic partitioning in virtualized environment

Abstract

With the prevalence of virtualization and cloud computing, many real-time applications are running in virtualized cloud environments. However, their performance cannot be guaranteed because current hypervisors' CPU schedulers aim to share CPU resources fairly and improve system throughput. They do not consider real-time constraints of these applications, which result in frequent deadline misses. In this paper, we present a real-time scheduling framework in virtualized environment. In the framework, we propose a mechanism called multi-core dynamic partitioning to divide physical CPUs (PCPUs) into two pools dynamically according to the scheduling parameters of real-time virtual machines (RT-VMs). We apply different schedulers to these pools to schedule RT-VMs and non-RT-VMs respectively. Besides, we design a global earliest deadline first (vGEDF) scheduler to schedule RT-VMs. We implement a prototype in the Xen hypervisor and conduct experiments to verify its effectiveness. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.