Affinity-aware dynamic pinning scheduling for virtual machines

Virtualization provides an effective management in server consolidation. The transparence enables different kinds of servers running in the same platform, making full use of hardware resource. However, virtualization introduces two-level schedulers: one from Guest OS, where the tasks are scheduled to virtual CPUs (VCPUs); the other from the virtual machine monitor (VMM), where VCPUs are scheduled to CPUs. As a result, the lower level scheduler is ignorant of the task information so that it cannot allocate appropriate proportion of CPU resource for every Guest OS in some cases. This paper presents an affinity-aware Dynamic Pinning Scheduling scheduler (DP-Scheduling). We aim at two objects: Bridging the semantic gap between Guest OS and VMM, introducing an affinity-aware method and providing the tasks information about CPU affinity to VMM; Bringing up a novel scheduling, DP-Scheduling, so that VCPU can be pinned or unpinned on one CPU's running queue dynamically. For this purpose, we first get the Machine Address (MA) of process descriptor from the angle of VMM. The affinity information is also acquired before the task is enabled to run. To acknowledge the affinity information, DP-Scheduling calls an API provided by us. Depending on the affinity information, we put forward a series of measures to implement pinning dynamically as well as to keep workload balance. All implementation is confined to Xen VMM and Credit scheduler. Our experiments demonstrate that DP-Scheduling outperforms Credit scheduling by testing various indicators for CPU-bound tasks, without interfering the load balance.