Slot scheduling : general-purpose multiprocessor scheduling for heterogeneous workloads

This thesis presents slot scheduling, a approach to general-purpose CPU scheduling for multiprocessor systems. The chief virtues of slot scheduling are versatility (the ability to support a broad range of classes of schedulers) and intelligibility (allowing system designers to easily reason about interactions among different kinds of schedulers). In particular, slot scheduling is well-suited for meeting the needs of both real-time and gang-scheduled applications. These characteristics distinguish slot scheduling from existing scheduler proposals which tend to suffer from overspecialization and complexity. Slot scheduling achieves its goals by employing an explicit “bulletin board” representation of CPU allocation that decentralizes the task of scheduling from the kernel and permits scheduling logic to be carried out by applications themselves. We show that this approach is both feasible and efficient