Popcorn Linux: Enabling Efficient Inter-Core Communication in a Linux-Based Multikernel Operating System
Popcorn Linux: enabling efficient inter-core communication in a Linux-based multikernel operating system Benjamin H. Shelton Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Engineering Binoy Ravindran Christopher Jules White Paul E. Plassman May 2, 2013 Blacksburg, Virginia Keywords: Operating systems, multikernel, high-performance computing, heterogeneous computing, multicore, scalability, message passing Copyright 2013, Benjamin H. Shelton Popcorn Linux: enabling efficient inter-core communication in a Linux-based multikernel operating system Benjamin H. Shelton (ABSTRACT) As manufacturers introduce new machines with more cores, more NUMA-like architectures, and more tightly integrated heterogeneous processors, the traditional abstraction of a mono- lithic OS running on a SMP system is encountering new challenges. One proposed path forward is the multikernel operating system. Previous efforts have shown promising results both in scalability and in support for heterogeneity. However, one effort’s source code is not freely available (FOS), and the other effort is not self-hosting and does not support a majority of existing applications (Barrelfish). In this thesis, we present Popcorn, a Linux-based multikernel operating system. While Popcorn was a group effort, the boot layer code and the memory partitioning code are the authors work, and we present them in detail here. To our knowledge, we are the first to support multiple instances of the Linux kernel on a 64-bit x86 machine and to support more than 4 kernels running simultaneously. We demonstrate that existing subsystems within Linux can be leveraged to meet the design goals of a multikernel OS.
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