This paper presents stride scheduling, a deterministic scheduling technique that efficiently supports the same flexible resource management abstractions introduced by lottery scheduling. Compared to lottery scheduling, stride scheduling achieves significantly improved accuracy over relative throughput rates, with significantly lower response time variability. Stride scheduling implements proportional-share control over processor time and other resources by cross-applying elements of rate-based flow control algorithms designed for networks. We introduce new techniques to support dynamic changes and higher-level resource management abstractions. We also introduce a novel hierarchical stride scheduling algorithm that achieves better throughput accuracy and lower response time variability than prior schemes. Stride scheduling is evaluated using both simulations and prototypes implemented for the Linux kernel.

Most priority-based schedulers lack the ability to control the relative execution rates of applications. A recent scheme, called lottery scheduling [WW94], uses randomization to control the execution rates of threads in proportion to the tickets allocated to them. However, randomization does not afford sufficient control over short periods of time; e.g., it would fail to provide the intended execution rates for threads that run for less than 10 timeslices. This paper presents a new scheme that controls execution rates over much smaller intervals and provides better service guarantees. Simulation results prove its advantage over lottery scheduling. The scheme is based on charging threads for CPU usage and occasionally skipping some threads to keep the usage close to the intended proportion. Unlike earlier charge-based schemes, which adjust the priorities of running threads, this scheme schedules threads in round-robin order. Despite its improved quality of service, the scheduler process...