Title :
Prioritizing local inter-domain communication in Xen
Author :
Sisu Xi ; Chong Li ; Chenyang Lu ; Gill, Christopher
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Washington Univ. in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
Abstract :
As computer hardware becomes increasingly powerful, there is an ongoing trend towards integrating QoS-critical systems as virtual machines (domains) on a common, virtualized computing platform. Given the lower latency of local inter-domain communication (IDC) on the same host (compared to inter-host communication), system administrators may preferably colocate domains so that they can communicate locally. When multiple IDC flows contend on the same host, it is important to properly prioritize IDC flows among domains to meet their respective QoS requirements. This paper examines the limitations of IDC in Xen, a widely used open-source virtual machine monitor (VMM) that recently has been extended to support real-time domain scheduling. We find that both the VMM scheduler and the manager domain can significantly impact IDC QoS under different conditions, and show that improving the VMM scheduler alone cannot effectively prevent priority inversion for local IDC. To address those limitations, we present RTCA, a Real-Time Communication Architecture within the manager domain in Xen, along with experimental results that demonstrate the latency of high-priority IDC can be improved dramatically from ms to μs by a combination of the RTCA and a real-time VMM scheduler.
Keywords :
processor scheduling; public domain software; quality of service; real-time systems; virtual machines; IDC QoS; IDC flow; QoS requirement; QoS-critical system; RTCA; VMM scheduler; Xen; computer hardware; high-priority IDC; interhost communication; local interdomain communication; manager domain; open-source virtual machine monitor; priority inversion; real-time communication architecture; real-time domain scheduling; system administrator; virtualized computing platform; Interference; Kernel; Linux; Quality of service; Real-time systems; Schedules; Virtual machine monitors;
Conference_Titel :
Quality of Service (IWQoS), 2013 IEEE/ACM 21st International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Montreal, QC
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-0589-8
DOI :
10.1109/IWQoS.2013.6550267