Corey: An Operating System for Many Cores

Multiprocessor application performance can be limited by the operating system when the application uses the operating system frequently and the operating system services use data structures shared and modified by multiple processing cores. If the application does not need the sharing, then the operating system will become an unnecessary bottleneck to the application's performance. This paper argues that applications should control sharing: the kernel should arrange each data structure so that only a single processor need update it, unless directed otherwise by the application. Guided by this design principle, this paper proposes three operating bstractions (address ranges, kernel cores, and shares) that allow applications to control inter-core sharing and to take advantage of the likely abundance of cores by dedicating cores to specific operating system functions. Measurements of microbenchmarks on the Corey prototype operating system, which embodies the new abstractions, show ho...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Aleksey Pesterev, Haibo Chen, Lex Stein, M. Frans Kaashoek, Ming Wu, Robert Morris, Rong Chen, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Yandong Mao, Yang Zhang, Yue-hua Dai, Zheng Zhang
• Keywords: Hardware Event Counters, Multiple Processing Cores, Operating System, OSDI 2008, Prototype Operating System