The hybrid scheduling framework for virtual machine systems

The virtualization technology makes it feasible that multiple guest operating systems run on a single physical machine. It is the virtual machine monitor that dynamically maps the virtual CPU of virtual machines to physical CPUs according to the scheduling strategy. The scheduling strategy in Xen schedules virtual CPUs of a virtual machines asynchronously while guarantees the proportion of the CPU time corresponding to its weight, maximizing the throughput of the system. However, this scheduling strategy may deteriorate the performance when the virtual machine is used to execute the concurrent applications such as parallel programs or multithreaded programs. In this paper, we analyze the CPU scheduling problem in the virtual machine monitor theoretically, and the result is that the asynchronous CPU scheduling strategy will waste considerable physical CPU time when the system workload is the concurrent application. Then, we present a hybrid scheduling framework for the CPU scheduling in the virtual machine monitor. There are two types of virtual machines in the system: the high-throughput type and the concurrent type. The virtual machine can be set as the concurrent type when the majority of its workload is concurrent applications in order to reduce the cost of synchronization. Otherwise, it is set as the high-throughput type as the default. Moreover, we implement the hybrid scheduling framework based on Xen, and we will give a description of our implementation in details. At last, we test the performance of the presented scheduling framework and strategy based on the multi-core platform, and the experiment result indicates that the scheduling framework and strategy is feasible to improve the performance of the virtual machine system.