Memory-Aware Fair-Share Scheduling for Improved Performance Isolation in the Linux Kernel

Performance interference between QoS and best-effort applications is getting more aggravated as data-intensive applications are rapidly and widely spreading in recently emerging computing systems. While the completely fair scheduler (CFS) of the Linux kernel has been extensively used to support performance isolation in a multitasking environment, it falls short of addressing memory-related interference due to memory access contention and insufficient cache coverage. Though quite a few memory-aware performance isolation mechanisms have been proposed in the literature, many of them rely on hardware-based solutions, inflexible resource management or ineffective execution throttling, which makes it difficult for them to be used in widely deployed operating systems like Linux running on a COTS SoC platform. We propose a memory-aware fair-share scheduling algorithm that can make QoS applications less susceptible to memory-related interference from other co-running applications. Our algorithm carefully separates the genuine memory-related stall from a running task's CPU cycles and compensates the task for the memory-related interference so that the task gets the desired share of CPU before it is too late. The proposed approach is adaptive, effective and efficient in the sense that it does not rely on any static allocation or partitioning of memory hardware resources and improves the performance of QoS applications with only a negligible runtime overhead. Moreover, it is a software-only solution that can be easily integrated into the kernel scheduler with only minimal modification to the kernel. We implement our algorithm into the CFS of Linux and name the end result mCFS. We show the utility and effectiveness of the approach via extensive experiments.