Towards completely fair scheduling on asymmetric single-ISA multicore processors

Single-ISA asymmetric multicore processors (AMPs), which combine high-performance big cores with low-power small cores, were shown to deliver higher performance per watt than symmetric CMPs (Chip Multi-Processors). Previous work has highlighted that this potential of AMP systems can be realizable vi...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Saez, Juan Carlos, Pousa, Adrián, Castro, Fernando, Chaver, Daniel, Prieto-Matias, Manuel
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2017
Country:Argentina
Institution:Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
Repository:CIC Digital (CICBA)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.cic.gba.gob.ar:11746/8545
Online Access:https://digital.cic.gba.gob.ar/handle/11746/8545
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Ciencias de la Información y Bioinformática
Asymmetric multicore
Scheduling
Operating systems
Fairness
CFS
Linux kernel
Description
Summary:Single-ISA asymmetric multicore processors (AMPs), which combine high-performance big cores with low-power small cores, were shown to deliver higher performance per watt than symmetric CMPs (Chip Multi-Processors). Previous work has highlighted that this potential of AMP systems can be realizable via OS scheduling. To date, most existing scheduling schemes for AMPs have been designed to optimize the system throughput, but they are inherently unfair. Although fairness-aware schedulers have been also proposed, they fail to effectively deal with user priorities and do not always ensure that equalpriority applications experience a similar slowdown. To overcome these limitations, we propose ACFS, an asymmetry-aware completely fair scheduler that seeks to optimize fairness while ensuring acceptable throughput. Our evaluation on real AMP hardware and using scheduler implementations in the Linux kernel demonstrates that ACFS achieves an average 23% fairness improvement over two state-of-the-art schemes, while providing higher system throughput.