Virtual machine scheduling for fast interrupt processing

Abstract

Virtualization is one of the most emerging technoligies. The number of domains consolidated in alimited number of physical machine tends to increase for the resource utilization. Now CPUs are well utilized, however, other peripherals likely remain idle while virtual domains requests to them due to the barrier between domains and VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor), because VMM knows almost nothing about guest domains because of compatibility issues. And CPUs often runs for a nothing when they are executing multi-threaded applications, due to the prolonged synchronization latency. These problems stems from the interrupt processing delay that it takes unexpected long time to handle the arrived event. RLS-scheduler, a virtual machine scheduling solution, finds out the case that the current hypervisor does not handle, and the prototype which is the modified Xen credit scheduler, improved the TCP bandwidth, disk write throughput, and communication-intensive multi-threaded application when the consolidation level is high.