Work

Fast Core Scheduling with Userspace Process Abstraction

Year: 2024

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: We introduce uProcess, a pure userspace process abstraction that enables CPU cores to be rescheduled among applications at sub-microsecond timescale without trapping into the kernel. We achieve this by constructing a special privileged mode in userspace to achieve safe and efficient separation among uProcesses. The core idea is a careful combination of two emerging hardware features - userspace interrupts (Uintr) and memory protection keys (MPK). We materialize the uProcess abstraction by implementing Vessel, a userspace core scheduler that colocates latency-critical and best-effort applications with minimal switching overhead when they time-share CPU cores. Our experiment result shows that Vessel exhibits better overall performance and low latency when multiple applications are colocated.

Source: ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)

DOI: 10.1145/3694715.3695976

Authors: Jiazhen Lin, Youmin Chen, Shiwei Gao, Youyou Lu

Institution: Tsinghua University

Language: English

Topic: Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China

Award: G4440035852