The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems
by Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe, Andrew Baumann, Paul Barham, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Tim Harris, Rebecca Isaacs
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| abstract: | Commodity computer systems contain more and more
processor cores and exhibit increasingly diverse archi-
tectural tradeoffs, including memory hierarchies, inter-
connects, instruction sets and variants, and IO configu-
rations. Previous high-performance computing systems
have scaled in specific cases, but the dynamic nature of
modern client and server workloads, coupled with the
impossibility of statically optimizing an OS for all work-
loads and hardware variants pose serious challenges for
operating system structures.
We argue that the challenge of future multicore hard-
ware is best met by embracing the networked nature of
the machine, rethinking OS architecture using ideas from
distributed systems. We investigate a new OS structure,
the multikernel, that treats the machine as a network of
independent cores, assumes no inter-core sharing at the
lowest level, and moves traditional OS functionality to
a distributed system of processes that communicate via
message-passing.
We have implemented a multikernel OS to show that
the approach is promising, and we describe how tradi-
tional scalability problems for operating systems (such
as memory management) can be effectively recast using
messages and can exploit insights from distributed sys-
tems and networking. An evaluation of our prototype on
multicore systems shows that, even on present-day ma-
chines, the performance of a multikernel is comparable
with a conventional OS, and can scale better to support
future hardware.
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