Operating system support for asymmetric multi-core architectures

Abstract

As transistor densities increase, it is becoming ever more difficult to gain significant performance improvements in single processing core architectures therefore, processor designers are turning to multi-core processing architectures to increase overall performance. Several new architectures consist of multiple different processing cores, each specialised to a particular purpose. These asymmetric multi-core architectures can achieve significant performance and energy saving advantages, however, they are notoriously diffi- cult to program. We present research towards more effective Operating System (OS) support for asymmetric multi-core processor architectures. Section 2 outlines our proposed OS framework, aimed at enabling the effective use of asymmetric multi-core architectures by general purpose applications. Section 3 describes a novel memory management algorithm for on-core local memory, the first step towards the creation of our proof of concept implementation of this OS