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Group Assignment: September 4, 2019

This document outlines a group assignment to modify the scheduler in the xv6 operating system to implement priority-based scheduling. Students are instructed to: 1) Add system calls to get and set process priorities and store priorities in the process control block. 2) Modify the round robin scheduler to use priorities to implement either weighted round robin or strict priority scheduling. 3) Write test cases in a separate program to test the new scheduler and show it causes different execution behavior compared to the default round robin scheduler.

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Manav Agrawal
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74 views

Group Assignment: September 4, 2019

This document outlines a group assignment to modify the scheduler in the xv6 operating system to implement priority-based scheduling. Students are instructed to: 1) Add system calls to get and set process priorities and store priorities in the process control block. 2) Modify the round robin scheduler to use priorities to implement either weighted round robin or strict priority scheduling. 3) Write test cases in a separate program to test the new scheduler and show it causes different execution behavior compared to the default round robin scheduler.

Uploaded by

Manav Agrawal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Group Assignment

September 4, 2019

• You need to submit your assignment in zip file. Zip file will contains
your codes and README file.Only one group member need to submit the
assignment.Please name your file as rollno (member in your group) e.g.,
IIT 2019001 4.

Implementing priority based round robin scheduler in XV6

The current scheduler in xv6 is a round robin scheduler. Please look at


lines 335-337 in scheduler() function in proc.c code in xv6 to verify that
xv6 runs a round robin scheduler. In this assignment, you will modify
the scheduler to take into account user-defined process priorities. Please
follow the steps below.

• Add new system calls in xv6 to get and set process priorities. When a
process calls setprio(n), the priority of the process should be set to the
specified value. The priority can be any integer value, with higher val-
ues denoting more priority. Add a system call getprio to read back the
priority set, in order to verify that it has worked. In an earlier lab as-
signment you have already been told how to add a system call in xv6.
However, in this particular system call, you have to add a variable in pro-
cess control block to store the priority of that process. To do the same,
look in to struct proc {...} in proc.h. You can add an unsigned in-
teger variable in that structure to store priorities. Do remember that
now every process will get some priority, hence, you should give a default
priority of some fixed integer to every process when a new process is allo-
cated in memory. You can do that by modifying the allocproc function
in proc.c. Another important thing here is that we are only passing a
priority value as a parameter to setprio(n), hence, you need to get the
process id in the syscall code of setprio() function. To do that you can use
struct proc *curproc = myproc();.

• Modify the xv6 round robin scheduler to use this priority in picking the
next process to schedule. How you interpret the priority and use it in
making scheduling decisions is a design problem that is entirely left to
you. For example, you can use the priorities as weights to implement a
weighted round robin scheduler. Or, you can use the priorities to do strict
priority scheduling. The only requirement is that a higher numerical pri-
ority should translate into more CPU time for the process. Your report

1
must clearly describe the design and implementation of your scheduler,
and any new kernel data structures you may have created for your im-
plementation. Also describe the runtime complexity of your scheduling
algorithm.
• Make sure you handle all corner cases correctly. For example, what is the
default priority of a process before its priority is set? What will happen
when a process you want to schedule blocks before its quantum finishes?
Also make sure your code is safe when run over multiple CPU cores. Please
describe how you handle all such cases in your report.
• Now, you will need to write test cases to test your scheduler. You must
write a separate user-space test program testmyscheduler that runs all
your tests. Your test program must fork several processes, set different
priorities within the forked processes, and show that the priorities cause
the child processes to behave differently. You must come up with at least
two test cases in this test program, where your scheduler causes a different
execution behavior as compared to the default round robin scheduler, and
you must quantify and explain this difference in the execution time of
processes. Note that your test cases must use both CPU-bound and I/O
bound processes, to show that your scheduler works correctly even when
processes block.
Note: Here is a simple test case to give you an example of what is expected.
You can create two identical child processes that execute a CPU-intensive
workload, and show that one finishes execution much faster than the other
when its priority is increased. Further, if you implement a weighted round
robin scheduler and give the higher priority process twice as many time
slices as the lower priority one, you should show that it finishes execution
roughly twice as fast. You should come up with such test cases that
showcase your scheduling algorithm both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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