Scheduler activations: effective kernel support for the user-level management of parallelism
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Scheduler-conscious synchronization
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Towards scalable multiprocessor virtual machines
VM'04 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Virtual Machine Research And Technology Symposium - Volume 3
The PARSEC benchmark suite: characterization and architectural implications
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation techniques
The hybrid scheduling framework for virtual machine systems
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
An analysis of Linux scalability to many cores
OSDI'10 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
A case for scaling applications to many-core with OS clustering
Proceedings of the sixth conference on Computer systems
Is co-scheduling too expensive for SMP VMs?
Proceedings of the sixth conference on Computer systems
Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach
Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach
Chameleon: operating system support for dynamic processors
ASPLOS XVII Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
Scalable address spaces using RCU balanced trees
ASPLOS XVII Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
Demand-based coordinated scheduling for SMP VMs
Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Towards fair and efficient SMP virtual machine scheduling
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
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Multiprocessor virtual machines expose underlying abundant computing resources to applications. This, however, also worsens the double scheduling problem where the hypervisor and a guest operating system will both do the CPU scheduling. Prior approaches try to mitigate the semantic gap between the two levels of schedulers by leveraging hints and heuristics, but only work in a few specific cases. This paper argues that instead of scheduling virtual CPUs (vCPUs) in the hypervisor layer, it is more beneficial to dynamically increase and decrease the vCPUs according to available CPU resources when running parallel workloads, while letting the guest operating system to schedule vCPUs to processes. Such a mechanism, which we call vCPU ballooning (VCPU-Bal for short), may avoid many problems inherent in double scheduling. To demonstrate the potential benefit of VCPU-Bal, we simulate the mechanism in both Xen and KVM by assigning an optimal amount of vCPUs for guest VMs. Our evaluation results on a 12-core Intel machine show that VCPU-Bal can achieve a performance speedup from 1.5% to 57.9% on Xen and 8.2% to 63.8% on KVM.