research-article

K2: a mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains

Authors:

Felix Xiaozhu Lin,

Lin ZhongAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, Volume 42, Issue 1

Pages 285 - 300

https://doi.org/10.1145/2654822.2541975

Published: 24 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile System-on-Chips (SoC) that incorporate heterogeneous coherence domains promise high energy efficiency to a wide range of mobile applications, yet are difficult to program. To exploit the architecture, a desirable, yet missing capability is to replicate operating system (OS) services over multiple coherence domains with minimum inter-domain communication. In designing such an OS, we set three goals: to ease application development, to simplify OS engineering, and to preserve the current OS performance. To this end, we identify a shared-most OS model for multiple coherence domains: creating per-domain instances of core OS services with no shared state, while enabling other extended OS services to share state across domains. To test the model, we build K2, a prototype OS on the TI OMAP4 SoC, by reusing most of the Linux 3.4 source. K2 presents a single system image to applications with its two kernels running on top of the two coherence domains of OMAP4. The two kernels have independent instances of core OS services, such as page allocator and interrupt management, as coordinated by K2; the two kernels share most extended OS services, such as device drivers, whose state is kept coherent transparently by K2. Despite platform constraints and unoptimized code, K2 improves energy efficiency for light OS workloads by 8x-10x, while incurring less than 6% performance overhead for a device driver shared between kernels. Our experiences with K2 show that the shared-most model is promising.

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Cited By

Brokhman TLifshits PSilberstein MDan TDahlia M(2019)GAIAProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358864(661-674)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
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Barbalace APicorel JBhatotia P(2019)ExtOSProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems10.1145/3343737.3343742(31-39)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3343737.3343742
Karaoui MCarno ALyerly RKim SOlivier PMin CRavindran BHollingsworth JKeidar I(2019)Scheduling HPC workloads on heterogeneous-ISA architecturesProceedings of the 24th Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3293883.3295717(409-410)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2019
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Index Terms

K2: a mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 42, Issue 1

ASPLOS '14

March 2014

729 pages

ISSN:0163-5964

DOI:10.1145/2654822

Editor:
Doug DeGroot
acm dot org

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS '14: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
February 2014
780 pages
ISBN:9781450323055
DOI:10.1145/2541940
General Chairs:
Rajeev Balasubramonian
University of Utah
,
Al Davis
University of Utah
,
Program Chair:
Sarita Adve
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champ

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 February 2014

Published in SIGARCH Volume 42, Issue 1

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Cited By

Brokhman TLifshits PSilberstein MDan TDahlia M(2019)GAIAProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358864(661-674)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358864
Barbalace APicorel JBhatotia P(2019)ExtOSProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems10.1145/3343737.3343742(31-39)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3343737.3343742
Karaoui MCarno ALyerly RKim SOlivier PMin CRavindran BHollingsworth JKeidar I(2019)Scheduling HPC workloads on heterogeneous-ISA architecturesProceedings of the 24th Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3293883.3295717(409-410)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3293883.3295717
Kepner JBrightwell REdelman AGadepally VJananthan HJones MMadden SMichaleas POkhravi HPedretti KReuther ASterling TStonebraker M(2018)TabulaROSA: Tabular Operating System Architecture for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous Compute Engines2018 IEEE High Performance extreme Computing Conference (HPEC)10.1109/HPEC.2018.8547577(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPEC.2018.8547577
Lombardi FDi Pietro R(2016)Trusted, Heterogeneous, and Autonomic Mobile CloudSecure System Design and Trustable Computing10.1007/978-3-319-14971-4_14(439-455)Online publication date: 2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14971-4_14
Lyerly RBilbao CMin CRossbach CRavindran B(2022)An OpenMP Runtime for Transparent Work Sharing across Cache-Incoherent Heterogeneous NodesACM Transactions on Computer Systems10.1145/350522439:1-4(1-30)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2022
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Vianes APetrot FRousseau F(2022)A Case for Second-Level Software Cache Coherency on Many-Core Accelerators2022 IEEE International Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping (RSP)10.1109/RSP57251.2022.10038999(29-35)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2022
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Chuang HLyerly RLankes SRavindran B(2020)Scaling Shared Memory Multiprocessing Applications in Non-cache-coherent DomainsProceedings of the 13th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference10.1145/3383669.3398278(13-24)Online publication date: 30-May-2020
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Ren YParmer GMilojicic D(2020)Ch’i: Scaling Microkernel Capabilities in Cache-Incoherent Systems2020 IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS)10.1109/ROSS51935.2020.00007(12-21)Online publication date: Nov-2020
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