Implementing a Thermal-Aware Scheduler in Linux Kernel on a Multi-Core Processor

As power dissipation causes thermal issues in cooling costs, lifetime and reliability, thermal management has become an important issue in today's OS and processor design. Early OS-level thermal management schemes were proposed and evaluated mainly with simulators or analytical models. In this paper, we implement a thermal-aware round-robin scheduling algorithm in the Linux kernel, and compare its performance with the ‘Heat-and-Run’ algorithm and the default Linux baseline scheduler on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor using representative benchmarks from SPEC2000, MiBench and NetBench. Our results indicate that the current Linux scheduler can easily be enhanced with thermal-awareness to show improved performance in terms of both the on-chip temperature condition and application throughput.