Hardware Microkernels for Heterogeneous Manycore Systems

Abstract— The migration away from power-hungry, speculative execution procesors towards manycore architectures is good news for the embedded and real-time systems community. Commodity platforms with large numbers of heterogeneous processors can be leveraged to meet the stringent real-time requirements of next-generation embedded systems. Although promising, the large numbers of heterogeneous cores that can bring about new levels of performance also bring with them new challenges for designers of real-time operating systems. Researchers are already conjecturing that the scalability and heterogeneity of manycores will result in the retirement of our existing monolithic operating system structure. In this paper we first discuss some of the challenges that these manycore chips will present. We then discuss how hardware-based microkernels can provide the low latency, low jitter performance envelopes that are needed within real-time systems. We show how our hthreads hardware microkernel p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICPPW
• Authors: Jason Agron, David L. Andrews
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Hardware-based Microkernel, ICPPW 2009, Large Numbers, Real-time Systems