WARP: Enabling fast CPU scheduler development and evaluation

Abstract—Developing CPU scheduling algorithms and understanding their impact in practice can be difficult and time consuming due to the need to modify and test operating system kernel code and measure the resulting performance on a consistent workload of real applications. To address this problem, we have developed WARP, a trace-driven virtualized scheduler execution environment that can dramatically simplify and speed the development of CPU schedulers. WARP is easy to use as it can run unmodified kernel scheduling code and can be used with standard user-space debugging and performance monitoring tools. It accomplishes this by virtualizing operating system and hardware events to decouple kernel scheduling code from its native operating system and hardware environment. A simple kernel tracing toolkit can be used with WARP to capture traces of all CPU scheduling related events from a real system. WARP can then replay these traces in its virtualized environment with the same timing ch...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Haoqiang Zheng, Jason Nieh
• Keywords: CPU Scheduling, ISPASS 2009, Kernel Scheduling Code, Operating System, Software Engineering