Stride Scheduling: Deterministic Proportional-Share Resource Management

This paper presents stride scheduling, a deterministic scheduling technique that efficiently supports the same flexible resource management abstractions introduced by lottery scheduling. Compared to lottery scheduling, stride scheduling achieves significantly improved accuracy over relative throughput rates, with significantly lower response time variability. Stride scheduling implements proportional-share control over processor time and other resources by cross-applying elements of rate-based flow control algorithms designed for networks. We introduce new techniques to support dynamic changes and higher-level resource management abstractions. We also introduce a novel hierarchical stride scheduling algorithm that achieves better throughput accuracy and lower response time variability than prior schemes. Stride scheduling is evaluated using both simulations and prototypes implemented for the Linux kernel.