Research on Scalability of Operating Systems on Multicore Processors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges of scaling operating systems on multicore processors, focusing on lock contention, resource sharing, and methods to analyze and improve system performance as core counts increase.

Contribution

It provides analysis techniques and strategies to identify and mitigate scalability bottlenecks caused by lock contention and resource sharing in multicore operating systems.

Findings

Lock contention significantly limits speedup on multicore systems.

Strategies to avoid lock thrashing improve scalability.

Resource sharing impacts performance as core counts grow.

Abstract

Large number of cores and hardware resource sharing are two characteristics on multicore processors, which bring new challenges for the design of operating systems. How to locate and analyze the speedup restrictive factors in operating systems, how to simulate and avoid the phenomenon that speedup decreases with the number of cores because of lock contention (i.e., lock thrashing) and how to avoid the contention of shared resources such as the last level cache are key challenges for the operating system scalability research on multicore systems.