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