When synchronization primitives such as locking and read-copy update (RCU) execute within virtual machines (VMs), preemption can cause multi-second latency spikes, increasing peak memory footprint and fragmentation inside VMs, which in turn may trigger swapping or VM ballooning. The resulting CPU utilization and memory footprint increases can negate the serverconsolidation benefits of virtualiz...

We construct subgame-perfect equilibria with mixed strategies for symmetric stochastic timing games with arbitrary strategic incentives. The strategies are qualitatively different for local firstor second-mover advantages, which we analyse in turn. When there is a local second-mover advantage, the players may conduct a war of attrition with stopping rates that we characterize in terms of the Sn...

In real-time computing scenarios, we are concerned with logical as well as temporal accuracy of the results. While developing algorithms or performing schedulability analysis, preemption overheads are usually ignored even, though it’s an operation that consumes finite amount of time. Preemption allows higher priority tasks to halt the lower priority tasks, though this need not be necessarily re...

Most multiprocessors are multiprogrammed to achieve acceptable response time. Unfortunately, inopportune preemption may significantly degrade the performance of synchronized parallel applications. To address this problem, researchers have developed two principal strategies for concurrent, atomic update of shared data structures: (1) preemption-safe locking and (2) non-blocking (lock-free) algor...

This document specifies Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Traffic Engineering Soft Preemption, a suite of protocol modifications extending the concept of preemption with the goal of reducing or eliminating traffic disruption of preempted Traffic Engineering Label Switched Paths (TE LSPs). Initially, MPLS RSVP-TE was defined with support for only immediate TE LSP displacement upon preemption....