Tableau Userspace Tools

This repository contains the userspace tools for the Xen implementation of the Tableau VM scheduler.

Configuration

Edit schedgen/config.py and change the CONFIG_SCHEDULE_ELF variable to point to the xc_ttxen_push_table binary in the Tableau Xen tree.

Generating Tables

The table_build script can be used to generate tables. It takes as a parameter a configuration file and writes its output to a hidden folder called .sched in the current working directory.

./table_build examples/example.conf

See examples/example.conf for details on the configuration file format.

Pushing Tables to the Hypervisor

The table_push script is used to push a generated table to the hypervisor. It takes a single parameter: the folder containing the generated table.

./table_push .sched

Load Balancing Background VMs

Tableau begins running newly-created VMs immediately using a background scheduler, which places a VM on a random core and schedules it whenever there are idle cycles on that core. To avoid long-term starvation, the load_balancer script can be used to load balance VMs across cores. It works by measuring the average number of idle cycles on each core, and re-partitioning background VMs based on it.

The script can be run as follows:

./load_balance