Title
Redline: first class support for interactivity in commodity operating systems
Abstract
While modern workloads are increasingly interactive and resource-intensive (e.g., graphical user interfaces, browsers, and multimedia players), current operating systems have not kept up. These operating systems, which evolved from core designs that date to the 1970s and 1980s, provide good support for batch and command-line applications, but their ad hoc attempts to handle interactive workloads are poor. Their best-effort, priority-based schedulers provide no bounds on delays, and their resource managers (e.g., memory managers and disk I/O schedulers) are mostly oblivious to response time requirements. Pressure on any one of these resources can significantly degrade application responsiveness. We present Redline, a system that brings first-class support for interactive applications to commodity operating systems. Redline works with unaltered applications and standard APIs. It uses lightweight specifications to orchestrate memory and disk I/O management so that they serve the needs of interactive applications. Unlike realtime systems that treat specifications as strict requirements and thus pessimistically limit system utilization, Redline dynamically adapts to recent load, maximizing responsiveness and system utilization. We show that Redline delivers responsiveness to interactive applications even in the face of extreme workloads including fork bombs, memory bombs and bursty, large disk I/O requests, reducing application pauses by up to two orders of magnitude.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2008
OSDI
extreme workloads,commodity operating system,o schedulers,interactive workloads,class support,current operating system,interactive application,o management,large disk,degrade application responsiveness,o request,best effort,real time systems,memory management,graphic user interface,operating system
Field
DocType
Citations 
Fork (system call),Interactivity,Commodity,Computer science,Response time,Real-time computing,Redline,First class,Graphical user interface,Operating system,Distributed computing
Conference
43
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.48
25
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ting Yang11325.26
Tongping Liu223410.34
Emery D. Berger3104855.87
Scott F. Kaplan424313.51
J. Eliot B. Moss52814378.24