Efficient consolidation-aware VCPU scheduling on multicore virtualization platform

Multicore processors are widely used in today’s computer systems. Multicore virtualization technology provides an elastic solution to more efficiently utilize the multicore system. However, the Lock Holder Preemption (LHP) problem in the virtualized multicore systems causes significant CPU cycles wastes, which hurt virtual machine (VM) performance and reduces response latency. The system consolidates more VMs, the LHP problem becomes worse. In this paper, we propose an efficient consolidation-aware vCPU (CVS) scheduling scheme on multicore virtualization platform. Based on vCPU over-commitment rate, the CVS scheduling scheme adaptively selects one algorithm among three vCPU scheduling algorithms: co-scheduling, yield-to-head, and yield-to-tail based on the vCPU over-commitment rate because the actions of vCPU scheduling are split into many single steps such as scheduling vCPUs simultaneously or inserting one vCPU into the run-queue from the head or tail. The CVS scheme can effectively improve VM performance in the low, middle, and high VM consolidation scenarios. Using real-life parallel benchmarks, our experimental results show that the proposed CVS scheme improves the overall system performance while the optimization overhead remains low. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.