Solaris System Resource Manager: All I Ever Wanted Was My Unfair Advantage (And Why You Can't Have It!)
Neil J. Gunther

TL;DR
The paper discusses the limitations of traditional UNIX round-robin schedulers and introduces a fair-share scheduling approach that dynamically allocates CPU resources based on user-defined shares to improve fairness and performance.
Contribution
It presents a new fair-share scheduling method for UNIX systems that adjusts CPU allocation based on resource shares, addressing fairness issues inherent in round-robin schedulers.
Findings
Fair-share scheduling improves fairness across users.
Modeling shows performance impacts of share allocation.
Comparison of commercial implementations highlights differences.
Abstract
Traditional UNIX time-share schedulers attempt to be fair to all users by employing a round-robin style algorithm for allocating CPU time. Unfortunately, a loophole exists whereby the scheduler can be biased in favor of a greedy user running many short CPU-time processes. This loophole is not a defect but an intrinsic property of the round-robin scheduler that ensures responsiveness to the short CPU demands associated with multiple interactive users. A new generation of UNIX system resource management software constrains the scheduler to be equitable to all users regardless of the number of processes each may be running. This "fair-share" scheduling draws on the concept of pro rating resource "shares" across users and groups and then dynamically adjusting CPU usage to meet those share proportions. The simple notion of statically allocating these shares, however, belies the potential…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed and Parallel Computing Systems
