Title
The Rcu-Reader Preemption Problem In Vms
Abstract
When synchronization primitives such as locking and read-copy update (RCU) execute within virtual machines (VMs), preemption can cause multi-second latency spikes, increasing peak memory footprint and fragmentation inside VMs, which in turn may trigger swapping or VM ballooning. The resulting CPU utilization and memory footprint increases can negate the server consolidation benefits of virtualization. Although preemption of lock holders in VMs has been well-studied, the corresponding solutions do not apply to RCU due to its exceedingly lightweight read-side primitives.This paper presents the first evaluation of RCU-reader preemption in a virtualized environment. Our evaluation shows 50% increase in the peak memory footprint and 155% increase in fragmentation for a microbenchmark, 23.71% increase in average kernel CPU utilization, 2.9 x increase in the CPU time to compute a grace period and 2.18 x increase in the average grace period duration for the Postmark benchmark.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
2017 USENIX ANNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE (USENIX ATC '17)
Preemption,Computer science,Parallel computing
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
2
0.37
References 
Authors
9
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Aravinda Prasad130.72
K. Gopinath2488.17
Paul E. McKenney327930.11