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WIESS '02 Abstract
Enhancements for Hyper-Threading Technology in the Operating System: Seeking the Optimal Scheduling
Jun Nakajima and Venkatesh Pallipadi, Intel Corp.
Abstract
Hyper-Threading Technology (HT) is Intel's implementation of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). Hyper-Threading Technology (simply HT hereafter) delivers two logical processors that can execute different tasks simultaneously using shared hardware resources on the processor package. In general a multi-threaded application that scales well and is optimized on SMP systems should be able to benefit on systems with HT as well for most cases, without any changes, although the operating system (OS) needs HT-specific enhancements. Among those we found process scheduling is one of the most crucial enhancements required in the OS, and we have been seeking the optimal scheduling for HT, evaluating various ideas and algorithms. One of our finds is, to efficiently utilize such execution resources, severe resource contention against the same and limited execution resource should be avoided in a processor package. The OS can attempt to utilize the CPU execution resources in processor packages if it can monitor and predict how the processes and system utilize the CPU execution resources in the multiprocessor environment. We have implemented a supplementary functionality for the scheduler called "Micro-Architectural Scheduling Assist (MASA)" on Linux (2.4.18) chiefly as a user program, rather than in the scheduler itself. This is because we believe that the users can tune the system more effectively for various workloads if we clarify how it works as a distinct entity. Most of this problem and solution is generic; all we require is for the OS to support an API for processor affinity and to provide per-thread or per-process hardware event counts from the hardware performance monitoring counters at runtime.
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