Title
Accelerating critical OS services in virtualized systems with flexible micro-sliced cores
Abstract
Consolidating multiple virtual machines into a single server has been widely adopted in cloud computing to improve system utilization. However, the sharing of physical CPUs among virtual machines in consolidated systems poses a new challenge in providing an illusion of continuous CPU execution to the guest operating systems (OS). Due to the time-sharing of physical CPUs, the execution of a guest OS is periodically interrupted, while the guest OS may not be aware of the discontinuity of virtual time against the real time. The virtual time discontinuity problem causes the delayed processing of critical OS operations, such as interrupt handling and lock processing. Although there have been several prior studies to mitigate the problem, they address only a subset of symptoms, require the modification of guest OSes, or change the processor architecture. This paper proposes a novel way to comprehensively reduce the inefficiency of guest OS execution in consolidated systems. It migrates the short-lived critical OS tasks to dedicated micro-sliced cores, minimizing the delays caused by time sharing. The hypervisor identifies the critical OS tasks without any OS intervention, and schedules the critical code sections onto the dynamically partitioned cores at runtime. The dedicated micro-sliced cores employ a short sub-millisecond quantum to minimize the response latencies for consolidated virtual machines. By readily servicing the critical tasks, the proposed scheme can minimize the adverse artifact of virtual machine consolidation without any modification of guest OSes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3190508.3190521
EuroSys '18: Thirteenth EuroSys Conference 2018 Porto Portugal April, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Virtualization,Virtual Time Discontinuity,Scheduling
Virtualization,Interrupt,Virtual machine,Scheduling (computing),Computer science,Hypervisor,Schedule,Operating system,Microarchitecture,Cloud computing,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5584-1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
18
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jeongseob Ahn116010.32
Chang Hyun Park2264.15
Taekyung Heo3111.50
Jaehyuk Huh4336.28