NV-CFS: NVRAM-Assisted Scheduling Optimization for Virtualized Mobile Systems

Mobile virtualization provides a secure and reliable mobile ecosystem in many aspects, such as personal privacy, corporate and public security. However, the limited memory resources of mobile systems and virtualization's memory demanding feature post challenges on main memory. Fortunately, non-volatile random access memory(NVRAM) provides opportunities to solve the problem with its attractive features, such as high density, low standby power and so on. However, the long write latency of NVRAM may slow down the performance of write-intensive tasks. Time-critical tasks may end up with unbearable performance. In this paper, we therefore focus on improving the performance of mobile virtualization with NVRAM/DRAM hybrid main memory. To achieve this, we propose NV-CFS, an user-centric virtual machine scheduler built for the ARM/KVM hypervisor. Experimental results based on various pseudo-randomly selected task sets show that NV-CFS can improve the performance more than 30%, and significantly reduce the task deadline miss ratio when compared to the traditional scheduling algorithm.