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Lecture 7 (Tuesday January 20, 2010)

Scheduling Basics

Scheduling the access of processes to non-sharable resources is a fundamental part of an operating system's job. The same is true of the thread scheduler within a user-level thread library. The CPU is the most important among these resource, because it typically has the highest contention. The high cost of additional CPUs, both in terms of the price of the processor and the cost of the technology in massively parallel systems, ensures that most systems don't have a sufficient surplus of CPUs to allow for their wasteful use.

The primary objective of CPU scheduling is to ensure that as many jobs are running at a time as is possible. On a single-CPU system, the goal is to keep one job running at all times.

Multiprogramming allows us to keep many jobs ready to run at all times. Although we can not concurrently run more jobs than we have available processors, we can allow each processor to be running one job, while other jobs are waiting for I/O or other events.

Observation: The CPU-I/O Burst Cycle

During our discussion of scheduling, I may make reference to the CPU-I/O burst cycle. This is a reference to the observation that programs usually have a burst of I/O (when the collect data) followed by a burst of CPU (when they process it and request more). These bursts form a cycle of execution.

Some processes have long bursts of CPU usage, followed by short bursts of I/O. We say that thee jobs are CPU Bound.

Some processes have long bursts of I/O, followed by short bursts of CPU. We say that thee jobs are I/O Bound.

The CPU Scheduler

Some schedulers are only invoked after a job finishes executing or voluntarily yield the CPU. This type of scheduler is called a non-premptive scheduler.

  1. A process blocks itself waiting for a resource or event
  2. A process terminates

But, in order to support interaction, most modern schedulers are premeptive. They make use of a hardware timer to interrupt running jobs. When a scheduler hardware interrupt occurs, the scheduler's ISR (Interrupt Service Routine) is invoked and it runs. When this happens, it can continue the previous task or run another. Before starting a new job, the scheduler sets the hardware timer to generate an interrupt after a particular amount of time. This time is known as the time quantum. It is the amount of time that a job can run without interruption.

A preemptive scheduler may be invoked under the following four circumstances:

  1. A process blocks itself waiting for a resource or event
  2. A process terminates
  3. A process moves from running to ready (interrupt)
  4. A process moves from waiting to ready (blocking condition satisfied)

The Dispatcher

Once the CPU scheduler selects a process for execution, it is the job of the dispatcher to start the selected process. Starting this process involves three steps:
  1. Switching context
  2. Switching to user mode
  3. Jumping to the proper location in the program to start or resume execution

The latency introduced by the dispatch is called the dispatch latency. Obviously, this should be as small as possible -- but is most critical in real-time system, those systems that must meet deadlines associated with real world events. These systems are often associted with manufacturing systems, monitoring systems, &c. Actually, admission is also much more important in these systems -- a job isn't automically admitted, it is only admitted if the system can verify that enough resources are available to meet the deadlines associated with the job. But real-time systems are a different story -- back to today's tale.

Scheduling Algorithms
So, given a collection of tasks, how might the OS (or the user-level thread scheduler) decide which to place on an available CPU?

First Come, First Serve (FCFS)
First In, First Out (FIFO)

FCFS is the simplest algorithm. It should make sense to anyone who has waited in line at the deli, bank, or check-out line, or to anyone who has ever called a customer service telephone number, "Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received."

The approach is very simple. When a job is submitted, it enters the ready queue. The oldest job (has been in the ready queue for the longest time) in the ready queue is always selected to be dispatched. The algorithm is non-premptive, so the job will run until it voluntarily gives up the CPU by blocking or terminating. After a blocked process is satisfied and returns to the ready queue, it enters at the end of the line.

This algorithm is very easy to implement, and it is also very fair and consequently starvation-free. No characteristic of a job bias its placement in the queue. But it does have several disadvantages.

Bonus Material

Everything in this section goes above and beyond lecture. It is just here for those who happen to be curious for more real-world detail.

Shortest-Job-First (SJF)

Another apporach is to consider the expected length of each processes's next CPU burst and to run the process with the shortest burst next. This algorithm optimizes the average waiting time of the processes. This is because moving a shorter job ahead of a longer job helps the shorter job more than it hurts the longer job. Recall my lunchroom story -- those who ate early had no lines, although there wasn't anyone to vouch for this.

Unfortunately, we have no good way of knowing for sure the length of any jobs next CPU burst. In practice this can be estimated using an exponential average of the jobs recent CPU usage. In the past, programmers estimated it -- but if their jobs went over their estimate, they were killed. programmers got very good at "The Price Is Right."

Sometimes this algorithm is premeptive. A job can be prempted if another job arrives that has a shorter execution time. This is flavor is often called shortest-remaining-time-first (SRTF).

Shortest-Time-To-Completion-First (STCF)

Shortest CPU time to Completion First (STCF). The process that will complete first runs whenever possible. The other processes only run when the first process is busy with an I/O event.

But, much like SJF, the CPU time is not known in advance.

Priority Scheduling (PRI)

Priority scheduling is designed to strictly enforce the goals of a system. Important jobs always run before less important jobs. If this scheduling discipline is implemented preemeptively, more important jobs will preempt less important jobs, even if they are currently running.

The bigest problem with priority-based scheduling is starvation. it is possible that low priority jobs will never execute, if more important jobs continually arrive.

Round Robin Scheduling (RR)

Round Robin scheduling can be thought of as a preemptive version of FCFS. Jobs are processed in a FCFS order from the run queue. As with FCFS, if they block, the next process can be scheduled. And when a blocked process returns to the ready queue, it is placed at the end of the list.

The difference is that each process is given a time quantum or time slice. A hardware timer interrupt preemept the running process, if it is still running after this fixed amount of time. The scheduler can then dispatch the next process in the queue.

With an appropriate time quantum, this process offeres a better average case performance than FCFS without the guesswork of SJF.

If the time quantum is very, very small, an interesting effect is produced. If there are N processes, each process executes as if it were running on its own private CPU running at 1/N th the speed. This effect is called processor sharing.

If the time quantum is very, very large -- large enough that the processes generally complete before it expires, this approach approximates FCFS.

The time quantum can be selected to balance the two effects.

Multilevel Queue Scheduling (MQS)

MQS is similar to PRI, except that the jobs arrive sorted by their priority. For example, all system jobs may have a higher priority than interactive jobs, which enjoy a higher priority than batch jobs. Jobs of different priorities are placed into different queues.

In some implementations, jobs in all higher priority queues must be executed before jobs in any lower priority queue. This absolute approach can lead to starvation in the same way as its simplier cousin, PRI. In some preemptive implementations, a lower-priority process will be returned to its ready queue, if a higher-priority process arrives.

Another approach is to time-slice among the queues. Higher priority queus can be given longer or more frequent time slices. This approach prevents absolute starvation.

Multilevel Feedback Queue (MFQ)

In the multilevel queuing system we described above, there is no social mobility. When aprocess arrives, it is placed in a queue based on its initial classification. It remains in this queue throughout its lifetime.

In a MFQ system, a process's priority can change as the result of its CPU utilization. Processes that have longer CPU bursts are lowered in importance. Processes that are I/O bound and frequently release the CPU prematurely by blocking are increased in importance.

This system prevents starvation and gives I/O bound processes the change to be dispatched and overlap with CPU bound processes. It fights the convoy effect.

Scheduling among queues can be done by varying the lenght or frequence of the time slice. Scheduling within each queue can also be varied.

Although this system sounds very pretty, it is very complex. In general this type of system is defined by the following parameters:

Traditional UNIX Scheduling - Introduction

I thought it would be interesting to spend some time considering scheduling in a real-world operating system. Today we'll talk about what I call "traditional" UNIX scheduling. This scheduling system was used, with little variation through AT&T SVR3 and 4.3BSD. Newer UNIX's use more sophisticated approaches, but this is a good place to start.

Priorities

The scheduling in these systems was priority based. The priority of a process ranged from 0 - 127. Counterintuitively, lower priorities represent more important processes.

The range of priorities is partitioned. Priorities in the range of 0 - 49 are reserved for system processes. Both user and system processes may have priorities over the full range from 0 - 127. Ths prevents user processes from interfereing with more important system tasks.

Parameters

A processes ultimate scheduling priority varies with several factors. The accounting of these factors is kept in the proc structure, which contains the following fields:

Elevated Priority in System Mode

p_pri is a number in the range of 0 - 127 that represents the priority of the process. This is the value of that the scheduler considers when selecting a process to be dispatched. This value is normally the same as p_usrpri. It however, may be lowered (making the process more important) while the process is making a system call.

Traditional UNIX systems did not have preemptive kernels. This meant that only one process could be in the kernel at a time. If a process blocked while in a system call, other user processes could run, but not other system calls or functions. For this reason a process which had blocked while in a system call often would have its p_pri value lowered so that it would expeditiously complete its work in the kernel and return to user mode. This allowed other processes that blocked waiting to enter the kernel to make progress. Once the system call is complete, the process's p_pri is reset to its p_usrpri.

User Mode Priority

The priority that a process within the kernel receives after returning from the blocked queue is called its sleep priority. There is a specific sleep priority associated with every blocking condition. For example, the sleep priority associated with terminal I/O was 28 and disk I/0 was 20.

The user mode scheduling priority depends on three factors:

The p_usr value is a system-wide default. In most implementations it was 50, indicating the most important level of scheduling for a user process.

Let's be Nice

The p_nice value defaults to 0, but can be increased by users who want to be nice. Remember that the likelihood of a process to be dispatched is inversly proportional to the priority. By increasing the process's nice value, the process is deacreasing its likelihood of being scheduled. Processes are usually "niced" if they are long-running, non-interactive backgorund processes.

Tracking CPU usage

p_cpu is a measure of the process's recent CPU usage. It ranges from 0 - 127 and is initially 0. Ever 1/10th of a second, the ISR that handles clock ticks increments the p_cpu for the current process.

Every 1 second another ISR decreases the p_cpu of all processes, running or not. This reduction is called the decay. SVR3 used a fixed decay of 1/2. The problem with a fixed decay is that it elevates the priority of nearly all processes if the load is very high, since very few processes are getting CPU. This makes the p_cpu field nearly meaningless.

The designers of 4.3BSD remedied this side-effect by using a variable decay that is a fuction of the systems load average, the average number of processes in the run queue over the last second. This formula follows:

decay_factor = (2*load_average)/ (2*load_average + 1)

User Mode Priority - Final Formula

The scheduler computes the process's user priority form these factors as follows:

p_usrpri = PUSER + (p_cpu/4) + (2*p_nice)

Implementation

Artifacts of the old DEC VAX systems made it much more efficient to collapse the 127 priorities into 32 queues. So these systems in effect had 32 queues each holding processes in a range of 4 priority levels (0-3, 4-7, 8-11, 12-15, 16-19, etc).

The system maintained a 32-bit mask. Each bit represented a single queue. If the bit was set, there were jobs in the queue. If the bit was 0, the queue was empty. The system charged from low-bit to high-bit in this mask until it found a non-empty queue. It would then select a job Round Robin (RR) from this queue to be dispatched.

The round-robin scheduling with a time quantum of 100mS only applied to processes in the same queue. If a process arrived in a lower priority (more important) queue, that process would be scheduled at the end of the currently executing process's quantum.

High priority (less important) processes would not execute until all lower priority (more important) queues were empty.

The queues would be check by means of the bit mask every time a process blocked or a time quantum expired.

Analysis

This method of scheduling proved viable for general purpose systems, but it does have several limitations:

Sharing or Fighting?

Cooperating processes (or threads) often share resources. Some of these resources can be concurrently used by any number of processes. Others can only be used by one process at a time.

The air in this room can be shared by everyone without coordination -- we don't have to coordinate our breathing. But the printer wouldn't be much use to any of us if all of us were to use it at the same time. I'm not sure exactly how that would work -- perhaps it would print all of our images superimposed, or perhaps a piece here-or-there from each of our jobs. But in any case, we would want to do something to coordinate our use of the resource. Another example might be an interesection -- unless we have some way of controlling our use of an intersection (stop signs? traffic lights?) -- smack!

The policy that defines how a resource should be shared is known as a sharing discipline. The most common sharing discipline is mutual exclusion, but many others are possible. When the mutual exclusion policy is used, the use of a resource by one process excludes its use by any other process.

How do we manipulate a resource from within a program? With code, of course. The portion of a program that manipulates a resource in a way that requires mutual exclusion, or some other type of protection, is known as a critical section. We also noted that in practice, even a single line of HLL code can create a critical section, because one line of HLL code may be translated into several lines of interruptable machine-language code.

Characteristics of a Solution

A solution to the mutual exclusion problem must satisfy three conditions:
  1. Mutual Exclusion: Only one process can be in the critical section at a time -- otherwise what critical section?.
  2. Progress: No process is forced to wait for an available resource -- otherwise very wasteful.
  3. Bounded Waiting: No process can wait forever for a resource -- otherwise an easy solution: no one gets in.

Disabling Interrupts

It is actually possible to synchronize an arbitrary number of processes within an operating system without hardware support. But, this is a tangled, ticklish, and generally unfortunate businesss. In practice, in order to implement a general-purpose solution in the real world, we're going to need a small amount of hardware support to implement very basic concurrency control primitives, from which we can build up richer abstractions or simply correct, easily readable solutions to straight-forward problems.

One rudimentary form of synchronization supported by hardware is frequently used within the kernel: disabling interrupts. The kernel often guarantees that its critical sections are mutually exclusive simply by maintaining control over the execution. Most kernels disable interrupts around many critical regions ensuring that they can not be interrupted. Interrupts are reenabled immediately after the critical section.

Unfortunately, this approach only works in kernel mode and can result in a delayed service of interrupts -- or lost interrupts (if two of the same type occur before interrupts are reenabled). And it only works on uniprocesors, becuase diabling interrupts can be very time-consuming and messy if several processors are involved.

    Disable_interrupts();

    <<< critical section >>>

    Enable_interrupts();
    

Special Instructions

Another approach is to build into the hardware very simple instructions that can give us a limited guarantee of mutual exclusion in hardware. From these small guarantees, we can build more complex constructs in software. This is the approach that is, virtually universally, in use in modern hardware.

Test-and-Set

One such instruction that is commonly implemented in hardware is test-and-set. This instruction allows the atomic testing and setting of a value.

The semantics of the instruction are below. Please remember that it is atomic. It is not interruptable.

    TS (<mem loc>)
    {
       if (<memloc> == 0)
       {
           <mem loc> = 1;
           return 0;
       }
       else
       {
          return 1;
       }
    

Given the test-and-set instruction, we can build a simple synchronization primiative called the mutex or spin-lock. A process busy-waits until the test-and-set succeeds, at which time it can move into the critical section. When done, it can mark the critical section as available by setting the mutex's value back to 0 -- it is assumed that this operation is atomic.

    Acquire_mutex(<mutex>) /* Before entering critical section */
    {
        while(TS(<mutex>))
    }

    Release_mutex(<mutex>) /* After exiting critical section */
    {
        <mutex> = 0;
    }
    

Compare-and-Swap

Another common hardware-supplied instruction that is useful for building synchronization primatives is compare-and-swap. Much like test-and-set, it is atomic in hardware -- the pseudo-code below just illustrates the semantics, it is not meant to in any way suggest that the instruction is interruptable.

    CS (<mem loc>, <expected value>, <new value>)
    {
        if (<memloc> == <expected value>))
        {
           <mem loc> = <new value>;
           return 0;
        }
        else
        {
           return 1;
        }
    

You may also want to note that test-and-set is just a special case of compare-and-swap:

TS(x) == CS (x, 0, 1)

The pseudo-code below illustration the creation of a mutex (spin lock) using compare-and-swap:

    Acquire_mutex(<mutex>) /* Before entering critical section */
    {
       while (CS (<mutex>, 1, 0))
       ;
    }

    Release_mutex(<mutex>) /* After exiting critical section */
    {
       <mutex> =  1;
    }

    

Counting Semaphores

Now that we have hardware support, and a very basic primative, the mutex, we can build higher-level synchronization constructs that can make our life easier.

The first of these higher-level primatives that we'll discuss is a new type of variable called a semaphore. It is initially set to an integer value. After initialization, its value can only be affected by two operations:

P(x) was named from the Dutch word proberen, which means to test.

V(x) was named from the Dutch word verhogen, which means to increment.

The pseudo-code below illustrates the semantics of the two semaphore operations. This time the operations are made to be atomic outside of hardware using the hardware support that we discussed earlier -- but more on that soon.

    /* proberen - test *.
    P(sem)
    {
       while (sem <= 0)
       ;
       sem = sem - 1;
    }


    /* verhogen - to increment */
    V(sem)
    {
       sem = sem + 1;
    }
    

In order to ensure that the critical sections within the semaphores themselves remain protected, we make use of mutexes. In this way we again grow a smaller guarantee into a larger one:

    P (csem) {
       while (1)  {
          Acquire_mutex (csem.mutex);
          if (csem.value <= 0) {
             Release_mutex (csem.mutex);
             continue;
          } 
          else {
              csem.value = csem.value – 1;
              Release_mutex (csem.mutex);
              break;
          }
       }
    }


    V (csem) 
    {
        Acquire_mutex (csem.mutex);
        csem.value = csem.value + 1;
        Release_mutex (csem.mutex);
    }
    

But let's carefully consider our implementation of P(csem). If contention is high and/or the critical section is large, we could spend a great deal of time spinning. Many processes could occupy the CPU and do nothing -- other than waste cycles waiting for a process in the runnable queue to run and release the critical section. This busy-waiting makes already high resource contention worse.

But all is not lost. With the help of the OS, we can implement semaphores so that the calling process will block instead of spin in the P() operation and wait for the V() operation to "wake it up" making it runnable again.

The pseudo-code below shows the implementation of such a semaphore, called a blocking semaphore:

    P (csem) {
       while (1)  {
          Acquire_mutex (csem.mutex);
          if (csem.value <= 0) {
             insert_queue (getpid(), csem.queue);
             Release_mutex_and_block (csem.mutex); /* atomic: lost wake-up */
          } 
          else {
              csem.value = csem.value – 1;
              Release_mutex (csem.mutex);
              break;
          }
       }
    }


    V (csem) 
    {
        Acquire_mutex (csem.mutex);

        csem.value = csem.value + 1;
        dequeue_and_wakeup (csem.queue)

        Release_mutex (csem.mutex);
    }
    

Please notice that the P()ing process must atomically become unrunnable and release the mutex. This is becuase of the risk of a lost wakeup. Imagine the case where these were two different operations: release_mutex(xsem.mutex) and sleep(). If a context-switch would occur in between the release_mutex() and the sleep(), it would be possible for another process to perform a V() operation and attempt to dequeue_and_wakeup() the first process. Unfortunately, the first process isn't yet asleep, so it missed the wake-up -- instead, when it again runs, it immediately goes to sleep with no one left to wake it up.

Operating systems generally provide this support in the form of a sleep() system call that takes the mutex as a parameter. The kernel can then release the mutex and put the process to sleep in an environment free of interruptions (or otherwise protected).

Boolean Semaphores

In many cases, it isn't necessary to count resources -- there is only one. A special type of semaphore, called a boolean semaphore may be used for this purpose. Boolean semaphores may only have a value of 0 or 1. In most systems, boolean semaphores are just a special case of counting semaphores, also known as general semaphores.