Design and implementation of a locking-aware scheduler for multiprocessor environments

Abstract

Virtualization technology has known to be an efficient solution to reduce space and costs by using server consolidation and to provide flexible management of system resources. The widely used virtual machine monitor (VMM) such as Xen is not perfectly optimized for running over multi-processor systems. In order to run VMMs over multi-processor systems without performance degradation, the scheduling algorithms running in the VMM should be modified. This paper proposes a Locking-aware Scheduler (LAS) algorithm that has eliminated the lock-holder preemption (LHP) problem, which causes the inefficient use of CPU resources in multi-processor environments. By using LAS algorithm, Xen allows guest kernel to acquire spin-lock and prevents the preemption of related processors during operation. The performance results show that our proposed algorithm solves the LHP problem and reduces the total execution time. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.