Xen Project Schedulers

Overview

The Xen Project Hypervisor supports several different schedulers with different properties.

Different schedulers can be assigned to

• an entire host
• a pool of physical CPU’s on a host (VMs need to be assigned to a pool or pinned to a CPU)

Scheduler parameters can be modified per

• an entire host
• a CPU pool
• A Virtual Machine

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Schedulers in Xen 4.5 and beyond

Legend:

• ✓ likely in 4.6
• ✓ possible in 4.6

Scheduler	Use-cases	Xen 4.5	Plans for 4.6+
Credit	General Purpose	Supported Default	Supported
Credit 2	General Purpose Optimized for lower latency, high VM density	Experimental	✓ Supported ✓ Default
RTDS	Soft & Firm Real-time Multicore Embedded, Automotive, Graphics & Gaming in the Cloud, Low Latency Workloads	Experimental	✓ Hardening ✓ Optimization ✓ Better XL support ✓ <1μs granularity ✓ Supported
ARINC 653	Hard Real-time Single core Avionics, Drones, Medical	Supported? Compile time	✓ No change

Also See

• sched heading in Xen unstable boot options (for other versions of Xen, see Category:ManPage)
• XL scheduler commands under SCHEDULER SUBCOMMANDS in XL unstable man pages (for other versions of Xen, see Category:ManPage)
• Credit Scheduler
• Credit2 Scheduler Development
• RTDS-Based-Scheduler
• ARINC653 Scheduler
• Category:Scheduler
• Category:Resource Management
• Category:Performance

History of Xen Schedulers

This content was originally compiled by Jacob Mathai.

1. Borrowed Virtual Time (Xen 2.0/3.0)

sched=bvt
Global Parameters
ctx_allow - The context switch allowance is similar to the ''quantum'' in traditional schedulers. 
It is the minimum time that a scheduled domain will be allowed to run before being preempted.

Per-domain parameters
mcuadv - the MCU (Minimum Charging Unit) advance determines the proportional share of the CPU
that a domain receives. It is set inversely proportionally to a domain's sharing weight.
warp - the amount of `virtual time' the domain is allowed to warp backwards
warpl - the warp limit is the maximum time a domain can run warped for
warpu - the unwarp requirement is the minimum time a domain must run unwarped for before it can warp again

2. Atropos (Xen 2.0)

sched=atropos
Atropos is a soft real time scheduler. It provides guarantees about absolute shares of the CPU, 
with a facility for sharing slack CPU time on a best-effort basis. It can provide timeliness 
guarantees for latency-sensitive domains.

Every domain has an associated period and slice. The domain should receive `slice' nanoseconds 
every `period' nanoseconds. This allows the administrator to configure both the absolute share 
of the CPU a domain receives and the frequency with which it is scheduled.

Note: don't over-commit the CPU when using Atropos (i.e. don't reserve more CPU than is 
available -- the utilization should be kept to slightly less than 100% in order to ensure predictable 
behavior).

Per-domain parameters :
period - The regular time interval during which a domain is guaranteed to receive its allocation of CPU time.
slice - The length of time per period that a domain is guaranteed to run for (in the absence of voluntary yielding of the CPU).
latency - The latency hint is used to control how soon after waking up a domain it should be scheduled.
xtratime - This is a boolean flag that specifies whether a domain should be allowed a share of the system slack time.

3. Round Robin (Xen 2.0)

sched=rrobin
The round robin scheduler is included as a simple demonstration of Xen's internal scheduler 
API. It is not intended for production use.

Global Parameters
rr_slice - The maximum time each domain runs before the next scheduling decision is made.

4. sEDF scheduler (Xen 3.0)

sched=sedf
(from docs/misc/sedf_scheduler_mini-HOWTO.txt)
This scheduler provides weighted CPU sharing in an intuitive way and uses realtime-algorithms 
to ensure time guarantees.

Per-domain parameters
use "xm sched-sedf <dom-id> <period> <slice> <latency-hint> <extra> <weight>"
-period/slice are the normal EDF scheduling parameters in nanosecs
-latency-hint is the scaled period in case the domain is doing heavy I/O
(unused by the currently compiled version)
-extra is a flag (0/1), which controls whether the domain can run in extra-time
-weight is mutually exclusive with period/slice and specifies another way of setting a domains cpu slice
See wikipedia for a short intro to EDF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_deadline_first_scheduling

5. ARINC 653 (Xen 4.1)

sched=arinc653
The arinc653 scheduler follows the ARINC 653 specification for scheduling, giving each partition (domain) a
fixed, dedicated time slot for execution.

Note: Current implementation does not support multicore, so 'maxcpus=1' must be set at boot.

System Calls and Scheduling

Some Scheduling System Calls
/schedule.c
SCHEDOP_yield
SCHEDOP_block
SCHEDOP_shutdown
 *nice( )
getpriority( )
setpriority( )
sched_getscheduler( )
sched_setscheduler( )
sched_getparam( )
sched_setparam( )
sched_yield( )
sched_get_ priority_min( )
sched_get_ priority_max( )
sched_rr_get_interval( )

A related wiki topic on Real Time Applications & Preemption .