Xen project Mailing List

Hi, Dario:

Thanks for starting this topic. I have limited experience with industry, so I'll provide some input from the academia side. Please correct me if I am wrong.

1. A real-time CPU scheduler would be great. That's actually the motivation that we started the RT-Xen project.

The scheduling in a virtualized environments maps to a two-level scheduling hierarchy in real-time systems. We can use the hierarchical scheduling theories to provide formal analysis for it. One key assumption of these theories is a formally defined 'server' to represent the VCPUs. We implemented and compared different servers in RT-Xen. and published at:

S. Xi, J. Wilson, C. Lu and C.D. Gill, RT-Xen: Towards Real-time Hypervisor Scheduling in Xen, ACM International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT'11), October 2011.

J. Lee, S. Xi, S. Chen, L.T.X. Phan, C. Gill, I. Lee, C. Lu and O. Sokolsky, Realizing Compositional Scheduling through Virtualization, IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS'12), April 2012.

They can be found at RT-Xen website: https://sites.google.com/site/realtimexen/publications

2. An appropriate cache management scheme would be great.

Current CPU architecture have both dedicated cache (usually L1 and L2) and shared cache (L3).

a) For the dedicated cache, existing credit1 use partitioned scheduling with load-balancing; while credit2 use modified global scheduling with migration resistant/compensation. I think if the user runs cache-sensitive application, partitioned scheduler seems to be a better choice.

b) For the shared cache, the 'noisy neighbor' problem where one guest OS just runs a cache-busy application and everybody hurts can happen. I have seen several papers try to solve it, but don't know whether they will be integrated into Xen or not.

<1> If there are multiple LLC, each shared by a subset of PCPUs, a dynamic cluster scheme is proposed in this paper:

Min Lee, Karsten Schwan. "Region Scheduling: Efficiently Using the Cache Architectures via Page-level Affinity." ASPLOS 2012, London, UK, March 3-7, 2012.

<2> If there is one large shared LLC, cache partition by domain seems a solution. These two papers have explored it:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5207888&url="">

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11704-012-2099-6

3. An deterministic network latency through Domain-0 would be great.

Currently Xen does not support packet prioritization. Users can achieve similar function by using the Linux Traffic Control Tool in Domain-0, but priority-inversion can still happen.

We did some work on prioritizing inter-domain communication on Xen, and published at:

S. Xi, C. Li, C. Lu and C. Gill, Prioritizing Local Inter-Domain Communication in Xen, ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS'13), June 2013.

We are working on the actual network traffic through NIC now.

Thanks and I'd love to hear any feedback/comments/suggestions on RT-Xen.

Sisu

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello everyone,

So, looking at the last Xen Developer Summit, other co-located and
previous conferences, as well as here on the list, there appears to be a
booming interest in running Xen on embedded systems of various kind.

This mail to say that:
* we're ready to take up the challenge! :-)
* in doing that, we really are interested in everyone's collaboration
or, at very least, feedback.

So, if you work in embedded/automotive/aerospace/..., what are you
requirements? How can we improve Xen (on ARM) for your use case?

Personally, I'm mostly interested on the scheduling, latency and, in
general, real-time angle. So whether it is on and Android phone/tablet,
an in-car infotinement system, an audio workstation or a rocket that you
want to run Xen, tell me/us what you need in terms of increased
determinism and decreased latencies!

For instance, I think it would be nice to start with some measurements:
http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Development_Projects#Is_Xen_ready_for_the_Real-Time.2FEmbedded_World.3F
That would basically mean running some latency oriented benchmarks both
in Dom0 and in a guest(s), and compare the result with bare metal.
It would be similar to what Open Source Automation Development Lab
(OSADL) people do on "latency QA farm". Actually, how could would it be
to be able to get in touch with them and have Xen run in there? (They
already do something virt-related, but it's very limited).

https://www.osadl.org/QA-Farm-Realtime.qa-farm-about.0.html
https://www.osadl.org/Real-time-host-and-kvm-virtualization.qa-farm-rt-host-and-kvm.0.html

Here they are some (more) links:

- Presentations (from Lovene and Artem) of Xen on some typical embedded
systems (Android tablet and in-car infotinement)
* http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/sruk-xen-presentation2013v7dualandroid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km6gBnIqaWo&feature=youtu.be
* http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/xen-in-oss-based-in-vehicle-infotainment-systems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po1IeElg8tg&feature=youtu.be

- The Real-Time Xen project Sisu is working on:
* https://sites.google.com/site/realtimexen/

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks and Regards,
Dario

--
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)

--
Sisu Xi, PhD Candidate

http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~xis/
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Campus Box 1045
Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130

Re: [Xen-devel] Xen for real-time/embedded/automotive