An Asymmetry-aware Energy-efficient Hypervisor Scheduling Policy for Asymmetric Multi-core

Recently, asymmetric multi-core architecture have become an important issue in CPU design, software scheduling, and virtualization. In a virtualization environment, a hypervisor scheduler assigns virtual cores to physical cores for task execution. However, a load-balancing scheduling strategy for a symmetric multi-core platform (SMP) is unaware of core asymmetry. The deployment of such a strategy to an asymmetric platform may cause performance degradation or energy waste. To take full advantage of the improved power efficiency and performance made possible by asymmetric multi-core platforms, we need a new scheduling strategy. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient, asymmetry-aware scheduling mechanism for hypervisors on asymmetric multi-core platforms. The goal is to generate an energy-efficient scheduling plan with guaranteed performance.