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RT-Xen: towards real-time hypervisor scheduling in xen

Published: 09 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

As system integration becomes an increasingly important challenge for complex real-time systems, there has been a significant demand for supporting real-time systems in virtualized environments. This paper presents RT-Xen, the first real-time hypervisor scheduling framework for Xen, the most widely used open-source virtual machine monitor (VMM). RT-Xen bridges the gap between real-time scheduling theory and Xen, whose wide-spread adoption makes it an attractive platform for integrating a broad range of real-time and embedded systems. Moreover, RT-Xen provides an open-source platform for researchers and integrators to develop and evaluate real-time scheduling techniques, which to date have been studied predominantly via analysis and simulations.
Extensive experimental results demonstrate the feasibility, efficiency, and efficacy of fixed-priority hierarchical real-time scheduling in RT-Xen. RT-Xen instantiates a suite of fixed-priority servers (Deferrable Server, Periodic Server, Polling Server, and Sporadic Server). While the server algorithms are not new, this empirical study represents the first comprehensive experimental comparison of these algorithms within the same virtualization platform. Our empirical evaluation shows that RT-Xen can provide effective real-time scheduling to guest Linux operating systems at a 1ms quantum, while incurring only moderate overhead for all the fixed-priority server algorithms. While more complex algorithms such as Sporadic Server do incur higher overhead, none of the overhead differences among different server algorithms are significant. Deferrable Server generally delivers better soft real-time performance than the other server algorithms, while Periodic Server incurs high deadline miss ratios in overloaded situations.

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cover image ACM Conferences
EMSOFT '11: Proceedings of the ninth ACM international conference on Embedded software
October 2011
366 pages
ISBN:9781450307147
DOI:10.1145/2038642
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. deferrable server
  2. hierarchical scheduling
  3. periodic server
  4. polling server
  5. real-time
  6. sporadic server
  7. virtualization

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ESWeek '11
ESWeek '11: Seventh Embedded Systems Week
October 9 - 14, 2011
Taipei, Taiwan

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  • (2024)Hopscotch: A Hardware-Software Co-Design for Efficient Cache Resizing on Multi-Core SoCsIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2023.333271135:1(89-104)Online publication date: Jan-2024
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