CPU bandwidth control for CFS

Over the past few years there has been an increasing focus on the development of features which deliver resource management within the Linux kernel. The addition of the fair group scheduler has enabled the provisioning of proportional CPU time through the specification of group weights. As the scheduler is inherently work-conserving in nature, a task or a group may consume excess CPU share in an otherwise idle system. There are many scenarios where this unbounded CPU share may lead to unacceptable utilization or latency variation. CPU bandwidth control approaches this problem by allowing an explicit upper bound for allowable CPU bandwidth to be defined in addition to the lower bound already provided by shares.

There are many enterprise scenarios where this functionality is useful. In particular are the cases of pay-per-use environments, and user facing services where provisioning is latency bounded.

In this paper we detail the motivations behind this feature, the challenges involved in incorporating into CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler), and the future development road map.

• Software Systems