Title :
Adaptive audio-aware scheduling in Xen virtual environment
Author :
Chen, Huacai ; Jin, Hai ; Hu, Kan ; Yuan, Minhao
Author_Institution :
Services Comput. Technol. & Syst. Lab., Huazhong Univ. of Sci. & Technol., Wuhan, China
Abstract :
With the development of client virtualization technology, it has become an important tendency to apply soft real-time applications in virtual environment. Currently, most schedulers in VMM (i.e., virtual machine monitor) take the fairly sharing of processor resources and load balancing as a main concern, while show less regard to application diversity and I/O responsiveness. This would be unable to meet the requirement for latency-sensitive tasks, such as audio application. Audio stream may suffer from severe input buffer overrun or output buffer underrun, especially in the case that there is no real-time guarantee on virtualized clients under heavy load. In this paper, we introduce experiments to illustrate that current scheduler in Xen does a poor job in guaranteeing fluent audio playing, and then formulate the fluent playing conditions a scheduler should satisfy. A scheduling strategy with soft real-time support is proposed to improve the responsiveness of latency-sensitive guests. To implement our proposition, we extend the Credit scheduler by using flexible time slice and real-time priority. Our solution is audio-aware and capable of adjusting the real-time priority of guest domains adaptively, achieving a better experience for end-users. The experimental results show that audio glitches can be completely eliminated via our extended scheduler even when the system load is very high.
Keywords :
audio streaming; multimedia computing; scheduling; virtual machines; Xen virtual environment; adaptive audio-aware acheduling; audio application; audio stream; client virtualization technology; credit scheduler; input buffer overrun; output buffer underrun; soft real-time application; virtual machine monitor; ISO standards; Mixers; Sorting; Client virtualization; flexible time slice; latency-sensitive; real-time priority;
Conference_Titel :
Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), 2010 IEEE/ACS International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Hammamet
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-7716-6
DOI :
10.1109/AICCSA.2010.5586974