Fairness scheduler for multithreaded programs in Virtual Machine environment

Abstract

Fairness measure is used in designing Operating System (OS) schedulers to determine whether users or applications are receiving a fair share of system resources. PS (proportional share) schedulers are the dominant schedulers in Virtual Machine (VM) environment. A PS scheduler assigns a weight to every VM to allocate CPU cycles, allocating these cycles to VM is proportional to that weight. Current VM scheduling algorithms don't aware about the attributes (e.g. weights and number of threads) of the running processes in VMs. We illustrate this issue through experimental evaluations of the current scheduling thus revealing its weakness. A modification of current scheduler is proposed in this work to enable users to specify weights to VMs. Therefore, user gets CPU usage proportion to the assigned weight, the higher weight the more CPU usage and vice versa. In addition, a pricing calculator is considered to calculate the fee that the user should pay according to his desired CPU usage. Derived results show that our modification achieves accurate proportional fairness for a diverse set of workloads.