A multicore periodical preemption virtual machine scheduling scheme to improve the performance of computational tasks

In virtualized environments, the VMM (virtual machine monitor) scheduler is critical to overall performance, as it allocates the physical resources. However, traditional schedulers have poor I/O performance of mixed workloads. Although recent research significantly improves I/O performance, they degrade the performance of computational tasks by shortening time slices and reducing cache efficiency. In order to eliminate these problems while guaranteeing I/O performance, this paper presents a multicore periodical preemption scheduling scheme with three optimization techniques: (1) periodically coalescing and handling I/O events to reduce the preemption rate and scheduling latency, which guarantees I/O performance; (2) taking advantage of multicore environments and centrally handling I/O events on different cores in a Round-Robin manner to lengthen time slices, which improves the performance of computational tasks; (3) using a dedicated priority for I/O event handling to keep the CPU fairness. We implement a Xen-based prototype and evaluate the performance of I/O workloads and computation-intensive workloads. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheduling scheme efficiently lengthens time slices and improves the performance of computational tasks, achieving the same I/O performance as the existing approaches optimized for I/O.     

负载类型相关的Xen虚拟机系统性能模型

针对Xen虚拟机系统执行网络I/O密集型负载时容易耗尽Domain0的CPU资源而过载和执行计算密集型负载时在客户域平均性能与数目之间存在线性规划的问题,提出了两个负载类型相关的性能模型。首先,通过分析Xen虚拟机系统处理网络I/O操作的CPU资源消耗规律,建立了CPU核共享和CPU核隔离两种情况下的客户域网络I/O操作请求次数计算模型;然后,通过分析多个相同客户域并行执行计算密集型负载的平均性能与一个相同客户域执行相同负载的性能表现之间的关系,建立了并行执行计算密集型负载的客户域平均性能分析模型。实验结果表明,两个性能模型能够有效地限制客户域提交的网络I/O操作请求次数以防止Xen虚拟机系统过载,并求解给定资源配置情况下执行计算密集型负载的Xen虚拟机系统客户域伸缩性数目。     

面向虚拟机的远程磁盘缓存

在虚拟机(virtual machine)系统中,随着虚拟机数量和应用程序需求的不断增长,内存容量已经成为应用程序性能的主要瓶颈。为了提升内存密集型和I/O密集型程序的页面交换性能,提出了虚拟机的远程磁盘缓存机制REMOCA,它允许运行在一台物理主机上的虚拟机将其他物理主机的内存作为其二级磁盘缓存。由于网络传输延迟远远小于磁盘访问,用网络传输代替磁盘访问就能够有效地降低虚拟机的平均磁盘访问延迟。REMOCA的目标就要尽可能地减少磁盘访问。REMOCA运行在虚拟机管理器中,其基本工作原理是截获并处理虚拟机的页面淘汰、磁盘访问等事件。REMOCA能够与现有的虚拟机内存管理机制(如气球技术、影子缓存)相结合,从而提供更加灵活的内存资源管理策略。实验数据表明,REMOCA能有效地降低页面抖动对虚拟机性能的影响,并在很大程度上提升虚拟机中I/O密集型应用的性能。     

Energy-efficiency enhanced virtual machine scheduling policy for mixed workloads in cloud environments

Virtualization technology is an effective approach to improving the energy-efficiency in cloud platforms; however, it also introduces many energy-efficiency losses especially when I/O virtualization is involved. In this paper, we present an energy-efficiency enhanced virtual machine (VM) scheduling policy, namely Share-Reclaiming with Collective I/O (SRC-I/O), with aiming at reducing the energy-efficiency losses caused by I/O virtualization. The proposed SRC-I/O scheduler allows VMs to reclaim extra CPU shares in certain conditions so as to increase CPU utilization. Meanwhile, it separates I/O-intensive VMs from CPU-intensive ones and schedules them in a collective manner, so as to reduce the context-switching cost when scheduling mixed workloads. Extensive experiments are conducted on various platforms to investigate the performance of the proposed scheduler. The results indicate that when the system is in presence of mixed workloads, SRC-I/O scheduler outperforms many existing VM schedulers in terms of energy-efficiency and I/O responsiveness.     

基于任务分类的虚拟CPU调度模型

为了桥接语义鸿沟,提升I/O性能,需要对执行不同类型负载的虚拟CPU（vCPU）采取不同的调度策略,故而虚拟CPU调度算法亟需优化。基于KVM虚拟化平台提出一种基于任务分类的虚拟CPU调度模型STC（virtual CPU scheduler based on task classification）,它将虚拟CPU（vCPU）和物理CPU分别分为两个类型,分别为short vCPU和long vCPU,以及short CPU 和long CPU,不同类型的vCPU分配至对应类型的物理CPU上执行。同时,基于机器学习理论,STC构建分类器,通过提取任务行为特征将任务分为两类,I/O密集型的任务分配至short vCPU上,而计算密集型任务则分配至long vCPU上。STC在保证计算性能的基础上,提高了I/O的响应速度。实验结果表明,STC与系统默认的CFS相比,网络延时降低18%,网络吞吐率提高17%~25%,并且保证了整个系统的资源共享公平性。     

VMMB: Virtual Machine Memory Balancing for Unmodified Operating Systems

Virtualization technology has been widely adopted in Internet hosting centers and cloud-based computing services, since it reduces the total cost of ownership by sharing hardware resources among virtual machines (VMs). In a virtualized system, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) is responsible for allocating physical resources such as CPU and memory to individual VMs. Whereas CPU and I/O devices can be shared among VMs in a time sharing manner, main memory is not amendable to such multiplexing. Moreover, it is often the primary bottleneck in achieving higher degrees of consolidation. In this paper, we present VMMB (Virtual Machine Memory Balancer), a novel mechanism to dynamically monitor the memory demand and periodically re-balance the memory among the VMs. VMMB accurately measures the memory demand with low overhead and effectively allocates memory based on the memory demand and the QoS requirement of each VM. It is applicable even to guest OS whose source code is not available, since VMMB does not require modifying guest kernel. We implemented our mechanism on Linux and experimented on synthetic and realistic workloads. Our experiments show that VMMB can improve performance of VMs that suffers from insufficient memory allocation by up to 3.6 times with low performance overhead (below 1%) for monitoring memory demand.     

Self-Learning Disk Scheduling

Performance of disk I/O schedulers is affected by many factors, such as workloads, file systems, and disk systems. Disk scheduling performance can be improved by tuning scheduler parameters, such as the length of read timers. Scheduler performance tuning is mostly done manually. To automate this process, we propose four self-learning disk scheduling schemes: Change-sensing Round-Robin, Feedback Learning, Per-request Learning, and Two-layer Learning. Experiments show that the novel Two-layer Learning Scheme performs best. It integrates the workload-level and request-level learning algorithms. It employs feedback learning techniques to analyze workloads, change scheduling policy, and tune scheduling parameters automatically. We discuss schemes to choose features for workload learning, divide and recognize workloads, generate training data, and integrate machine learning algorithms into the Two-layer Learning Scheme. We conducted experiments to compare the accuracy, performance, and overhead of five machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine Algorithms. Experiments with real-world and synthetic workloads show that self-learning disk scheduling can adapt to a wide variety of workloads, file systems, disk systems, and user preferences. It outperforms existing disk schedulers by as much as 15.8% while consuming less than 3%-5% of CPU time.     

Task mapper and application-aware virtual machine scheduler oriented for parallel computing

We design a task mapper TPCM for assigning tasks to virtual machines, and an application-aware virtual machine scheduler TPCS oriented for parallel computing to achieve a high performance in virtual computing systems. To solve the problem of mapping tasks to virtual machines, a virtual machine mapping algorithm (VMMA) in TPCM is presented to achieve load balance in a cluster. Based on such mapping results, TPCS is constructed including three components: a middleware supporting an application-driven scheduling, a device driver in the guest OS kernel, and a virtual machine scheduling algorithm. These components are implemented in the user space, guest OS, and the CPU virtualization subsystem of the Xen hypervisor, respectively. In TPCS, the progress statuses of tasks are transmitted to the underlying kernel from the user space, thus enabling virtual machine scheduling policy to schedule based on the progress of tasks. This policy aims to exchange completion time of tasks for resource utilization. Experimental results show that TPCM can mine the parallelism among tasks to implement the mapping from tasks to virtual machines based on the relations among subtasks. The TPCS scheduler can complete the tasks in a shorter time than can Credit and other schedulers, because it uses task progress to ensure that the tasks in virtual machines complete simultaneously, thereby reducing the time spent in pending, synchronization, communication, and switching. Therefore, parallel tasks can collaborate with each other to achieve higher resource utilization and lower overheads. We conclude that the TPCS scheduler can overcome the shortcomings of present algorithms in perceiving the progress of tasks, making it better than schedulers currently used in parallel computing.     

Optimizing guest swapping using elastic and transparent memory provisioning on virtualization platform

On virtualization platforms, peak memory demand caused by hotspot applications often triggers page swapping in guest OS, causing performance degradation inside and outside of this virtual machine (VM). Even though host holds sufficient memory pages, guest OS is unable to utilize free pages in host directly due to the semantic gap between virtual machine monitor (VMM) and guest operating system (OS). Our work aims at utilizing the free memory scattered in multiple hosts in a virtualization environment to improve the performance of guest swapping in a transparent and implicit way. Based on the insightful analysis of behavioral characteristics of guest swapping, we design and implement a distributed and scalable framework HybridSwap. It dynamically constructs virtual swap pools using various policies, and builds up a synthetic swapping mechanism in a peer-to-peer way, which can adaptively choose different virtual swap pools.We implement the prototype of HybridSwap and evaluate it with some benchmarks in different scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution has the ability to promote the guest swapping efficiency indeed and shows a double performance promotion in some cases. Even in the worst case, the system overhead brought by HybridSwap is acceptable.     

Power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for mobile virtualization systems

A virtualized system generally suffers from low I/O performance, mainly caused by its inherent abstraction overhead and frequent CPU transitions between the guest and hypervisor modes. The recent research of polling-based I/O virtualization partly solved the problem, but excessive polling trades intensive CPU usage for higher performance. This article presents a power-efficient and high-performance block I/O framework for a virtual machine, which allows us to use it even with a limited number of CPU cores in mobile or embedded systems. Our framework monitors system status, and dynamically switches the I/O process mode between the exit and polling modes, depending on the amounts of current I/O requests and CPU utilization. It also dynamically controls the polling interval to reduce redundant polling. The highly dynamic nature of our framework leads to improvements in I/O performance with lower CPU usage as well. Our experiments showed that our framework outperformed the existing exit-based mechanisms by 10.8 % higher I/O throughput, maintaining similar CPU usage by only 3.1 % increment. In comparison to the systems solely based on the polling mechanism, ours reduced the CPU usage roughly down to 10.0 % with no or negligible performance loss.     

一种基于资源预分配的虚拟机软实时调度方法

虚拟机技术作为云计算的重要技术之一,近年来得到广泛关注,但是由于虚拟机管理层的存在,导致语义鸿沟,使得实时应用程序、并发程序等在虚拟机上的运行性能受到影响。分析和研究了Xen虚拟机管理器的Credit调度算法,针对其在并发调度和软实时调度方面存在的不足,提出了改进调度算法,实现了算法的调度器原型。新的调度算法对软实时虚拟机进行Credit比例预分配,采用动态调度时间片机制,以non-work-conserving方式实现软实时任务周期调度,保障调度周期满足运行周期要求。通过区分并发和非并发软实时虚拟机,采取不同的调度策略,在满足资源利用率的基础上,确保实时任务的顺利运行。测试结果表明,该调度算法在对并发和非并发软实时任务调度上,具有良好的表现,较好满足了软实时应用调度需求。     

基于微内核的虚拟机I/O安全机制

NOVA等微内核虚拟化架构解决了宏内核平台可信计算基体积和攻击面过大的问题, 但其仍缺乏虚拟机分等级保护和I/O资源访问控制等安全机制. 本文提出了安全域的概念, 并将虚拟机划分至不同的安全域, 进而建立可定制的I/O资源访问控制机制. 通过将访问控制模块添加至I/O资源访问的关键代码路径, 实现了不同安全域的I/O资源访问控制. 实验表明, 该机制提高了数据的隔离性与安全性, 仅对计算密集型、I/O密集型任务造成了较小的性能损耗.     

VBMq: pursuit baremetal performance by embracing block I/O parallelism in virtualization

Barely acceptable block I/O performance prevents virtualization from being widely used in the High-Performance Computing field. Although the virtio paravirtual framework brings great I/O performance improvement, there is a sharp performance degradation when accessing high-performance NAND-flash-based devices in the virtual machine due to their data parallel design. The primary cause of this fact is the deficiency of block I/O parallelism in hypervisor, such as KVM and Xen. In this paper, we propose a novel design of block I/O layer for virtualization, named VBMq. VBMq is based on virtio paravirtual I/O model, aiming to solve the block I/O parallelism issue in virtualization. It uses multiple dedicated I/O threads to handle I/O requests in parallel. In the meanwhile, we use polling mechanism to alleviate overheads caused by the frequent context switches of the VM’s notification to and from its hypervisor. Each dedicated I/O thread is assigned to a non-overlapping core to improve performance by avoiding unnecessary scheduling. In addition, we configure CPU affinity to optimize I/O completion for each request. The CPU affinity setting is very helpful to reduce CPU cache miss rate and increase CPU efficiency. The prototype system is based on Linux 4.1 kernel and QEMU 2.3.1. Our measurements show that the proposed method scales graciously in the multi-core environment, and provides performance which is 39.6x better than the baseline at most, and approaches bare-metal performance.     

Intel virtualization technology

A virtualized system includes a new layer of software, the virtual machine monitor. The VMM's principal role is to arbitrate accesses to the underlying physical host platform's resources so that multiple operating systems (which are guests of the VMM) can share them. The VMM presents to each guest OS a set of virtual platform interfaces that constitute a virtual machine (VM). Once confined to specialized, proprietary, high-end server and mainframe systems, virtualization is now becoming more broadly available and is supported in off-the-shelf systems based on Intel architecture (IA) hardware. This development is due in part to the steady performance improvements of IA-based systems, which mitigates traditional virtualization performance overheads. Intel virtualization technology provides hardware support for processor virtualization, enabling simplifications of virtual machine monitor software. Resulting VMMs can support a wider range of legacy and future operating systems while maintaining high performance.     

Xen虚拟机的虚拟CPU松弛协同调度方法

目前,Xen虚拟机调度算法均采用独立调度虚拟CPU的方式,而没有考虑虚拟机各虚拟CPU之间的协同调度关系,这会使虚拟机各个虚拟CPU之间产生很大的时钟中断数量偏差等问题,从而导致系统不稳定.为了提高系统的稳定性,基于Credit算法提出了一种比RCS(relaxed co-scheduling)算法更松弛的协同调度算法MRCS(more relaxed co-scheduling).该算法采用非抢占式协同调整方法将各个虚拟CPU相对运行的时间间隔控制在同步时间检测的上限门限值Tmax之内,同时利用同步队列中虚拟CPU优化选择调度方法和Credit算法的虚拟CPU动态迁移方法,能够更加及时地协同处理虚拟CPU,并且保证了各个物理CPU的负载均衡,有效地减少客户操作系统与VMM的环境切换次数,降低了系统开销.实验结果证明该方法不但保证了系统的稳定性,而且使系统性能得到一定程度的提升.虚拟机调度算法不仅影响虚拟机的性能,更会影响虚拟机的稳定性,致力于虚拟机调度算法的研究是一项非常有意义的工作.     

A disk bandwidth allocation mechanism with priority

Virtualization is a popular technology. Services and applications running on each virtual machine have to compete with each other for limited physical computer or network resources. Each virtual machine has different I/O requirement and special priority. Without proper scheduling resource management, a load surge in a virtual machine may inevitably degrade other’s performance. In addition, each virtual machine may run different kinds of application, which have different disk bandwidth demands and service priorities. When assigning I/O resources, we should deal with each case on demand. In this paper, we propose a dynamic virtual machine disk bandwidth control mechanism in virtualization environment. A Disk Credit Algorithm is introduced to support a fine-gained disk bandwidth allocation mechanism among virtual machines. We can assign disk bandwidth according to each virtual machine’s service priority/weight and its requirement. Related experiments show that the mechanism can improve the VMs’ isolation and guarantee the performance of the specific virtual machine well.     

Xen系统中CPU间歇性故障的自适应策略

Xen虚拟化环境没有考虑CPU的间歇性故障带来的影响。基于此,建立模拟CPU间歇性故障的时间模型,在该模型下未修改的Xen系统中的虚拟机会立刻崩溃。提出一种自适应的策略来改进Xen的CPU调度,该策略主动跟踪CPU的状态变化,将发生故障的CPU上的虚拟处理器迁移到可用的其他CPU上。实验结果表明,当CPU间歇性故障频繁发生时,应用该策略可以使虚拟机继续稳定地工作,性能平滑地降低。     

一种动态优先级排序的虚拟机I/O调度算法

I/O任务调度是影响I/O密集型虚拟机性能的重要因素。现有调度方法主要是针对虚拟机整机I/O带宽的优化,较少兼顾各虚拟域与全局性能,也无法满足域间差异化服务的要求。针对现有方法的不足,提出了一种动态优先级排序的虚拟机I/O调度算法DPS。该算法基于多属性决策理论,以离差最大化方法计算I/O任务的优先级评估属性权重,对I/O任务优先级进行综合评估;通过引入任务所在虚拟域价值,体现云计算环境下虚拟域重要性差异。在Xen系统中通过实验评测DPS调度虚拟化网卡的性能,结果表明,DPS能够有效提高指定域与全局的I/O任务截止期保证率、整机I/O带宽,并能为不同虚拟域的I/O应用提供差异化服务。     

Virtio network paravirtualization driver: Implementation and performance of a de-facto standard

One of the techniques used to improve I/O performance of virtual machines is paravirtualization. Paravirtualized devices are intended to reduce the performance overhead on full virtualization where all hardware devices are emulated. The interface of a paravirtualized device is not identical to that of the underlying hardware. The OS of the virtual guest machine must be ported in order to use a paravirtualized device. In this paper, the network virtualization done by the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is described. The KVM model is different from other Virtual Machines Monitors (VMMs) because the KVM is a Linux kernel model and it depends on hardware support. In this work, the overhead of using such virtual networks is been measured. A paravirtualized model by using the virtio [38] network driver is described, and some performance results of web benchmark on the two models are presented.     

虚拟机技术的复兴

虚拟机技术通过解除硬件和软件资源的体系结构和用户感知的行为与其物理实现之间的耦合,去解决计算机系统的安全、性能和可靠性等问题。本文简要地介绍了虚拟机技术的发展历史及其复兴的根源,总结了计算机系统虚拟方法共同的体系结构和虚拟机的概要分类。从CPU、内存和I／O三个方面综述了虚拟机监视器的实现技术,通过对当前产品应用和研究开发情况的阐述,可以感知未来虚拟机技术的发展趋势。最后,讨论了虚拟机技术给我国信息安全建设提供的历史机遇与挑战。