The last blog post gave us some brief descriptions of the various scheduling classes in Solaris. I focused on the Time Sharing (TS) class since it is the default. Hopefully we can see that the TS (and the IA class for that matter) makes its decisions based on how the threads are using the CPU. Are we CPU intensive or are we I/O intensive? It works well, but it doesn’t provide the administrator fine-grain control as it relates to resource management.

To address this, The Fair Share Scheduler (FSS) was added to Solaris in the Solaris 9 release.

The primary benefit of FSS is to allow the admin an ability to identify and dispatch processes and their threads based upon their importance as determined by the business and implemented by the administrator.

We saw the complexity of the TS dispatch table in the earlier post. Here we see the FSS table has no such complexity.

In FSS we use the concept of CPU shares. These shares allow the admin a fine level of granularity to carve up CPU resources. We are no longer limited to allocating an entire CPU. The admin designates the importance of the workload by assigning to it a number of shares. You dictate importance by assigning a larger number of shares to those workloads that carry a higher importance. Shares ARE NOT the same as CPU caps nor CPU resource usage. Shares simply define the relative importance of workloads in comparison to other workloads where CPU resource usage is an actual measurement of consumption. A workload may be given 50% of the shares yet at a point in time may be only consuming 5% of the CPU. I look at a CPU share as a minimum guaranty of CPU allocation, not as a cap on CPU consumption.

When we assign shares to a work load, we need to be aware of the shares that are already assigned. It is the ratio of shares assigned to one workload compared to all of the other workloads.

I speak of FSS in a “Horizontal” and a “Vertical” aspect when I’m delivering for Oracle University. In Solaris 9 we were able to define projects in the /etc/project file. This is the vertical aspect. In Solaris 10 Non-Global Zones were introduced and brought with it the Horizontal aspect. I assign shares horizontally across the various zones and then vertically within each zone in the /etc/project file if needed.

By default the Non-Global zones use the default scheduling class. If the system is updated with a new default class, they will obtain the new setting when booted or rebooted. The recommended scheduler to use with Non-Global Zones is the FSS. The preferred way is to set the system default scheduler to FSS and all zones then inherit it.

To display information about the loaded scheduling classes, run priocntl -l

priocntl can be used to view or set scheduling parameters for a specified process.

To determine the global priority of a process run ps -ecl

root@solaris:~# ps -ecl #The c displays properties of the scheduler, we see the class (CLS) and the priority (PRI)
 F S    UID   PID  PPID  CLS PRI     ADDR     SZ    WCHAN TTY         TIME CMD
 1 T      0     0     0  SYS  96        ?      0          ?           0:01 sched
 1 S      0     5     0  SDC  99        ?      0        ? ?           0:02 zpool-rp
 1 S      0     6     0  SDC  99        ?      0        ? ?           0:00 kmem_tas
 0 S      0     1     0   TS  59        ?    720        ? ?           0:00 init
 1 S      0     2     0  SYS  98        ?      0        ? ?           0:00 pageout
 1 S      0     3     0  SYS  60        ?      0        ? ?           0:01 fsflush
 1 S      0     7     0  SYS  60        ?      0        ? ?           0:00 intrd
 1 S      0     8     0  SYS  60        ?      0        ? ?           0:00 vmtasks
 0 S      0   869     1   TS  59        ?   1461        ? ?           0:05 nscd
 0 S      0    11     1   TS  59        ?   3949        ? ?           0:11 svc.star
 0 S      0    13     1   TS  59        ?   5007        ? ?           0:32 svc.conf
 0 S      0   164     1   TS  59        ?    822        ? ?           0:00 vbiosd
 0 S     16   460     1   TS  59        ?   1323        ? ?           0:00 nwamd

To set the default scheduling class use dispadmin -d FSS and then dispadmin -d to ensure it changed. Then run dispadmin -l to see that it loaded.

root@solaris:~# dispadmin -d
dispadmin: Default scheduling class is not set
root@solaris:~# dispadmin -d FSS
root@solaris:~# dispadmin -d
FSS	(Fair Share)
root@solaris:~# dispadmin -l
CONFIGURED CLASSES
==================

SYS	(System Class)
TS	(Time Sharing)
SDC	(System Duty-Cycle Class)
FX	(Fixed Priority)
IA	(Interactive)
FSS	(Fair Share)

Manually move add of the running processes into the FSS class and then verify with the ps command.

root@solaris:~# priocntl -s -c FSS -i all
root@solaris:~# ps -ef -o class,zone,fname | grep -v CLS | sort -k2 | more
 FSS   global auditd
 FSS   global automoun
 FSS   global automoun
 FSS   global bash
 FSS   global bash
 FSS   global bonobo-a
 FSS   global clock-ap
 FSS   global console-
 FSS   global cron
 FSS   global cupsd
 FSS   global dbus-dae
 FSS   global dbus-dae
 FSS   global dbus-lau
 FSS   global dbus-lau

Finally move init over to the FSS class so all children will inherit.

root@solaris:~# ps -ecf | grep init
    root     1     0   TS  59 16:33:44 ?           0:00 /usr/sbin/init
root@solaris:~# priocntl -s -c FSS -i pid 1
root@solaris:~# ps -ecf | grep init
    root     1     0  FSS  29 16:33:44 ?           0:00 /usr/sbin/init

With the FSS all set, we now assign shares to our Non-Global Zones
zonecfg -z
set cpu-shares=number of shares
exit zonecfg

To display CPU consumption run prstat -Z