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by transpute
434 days ago
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Have you looked at Barrelfish (2011) from Microsoft Research and ETH Zurich? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/barrelfish-exp... > “In the next five to 10 years,” Barham predicts, “there are going to be many varieties of multicore machines. There are going to be a small number of each type of machine, and you won’t be able to afford to spend two years rewriting an operating system to work on each new machine that comes out. Trying to write the OS so it can be installed on a completely new computer it’s never seen before, measure things, and think about the best way to optimize itself on this computer—that’s quite a different approach to making an operating system for a single, specific multiprocessor.” The problem, the researchers say, stems from the use of a shared-memory kernel with data structures protected by locks. The Barrelfish project opts instead for a distributed system in which each unit communicates explicitly. Public development stopped in March 2020, https://github.com/BarrelfishOS/barrelfish & https://barrelfish.org |
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Concretely, there are a lot of things that are getting more "NOC-y" (network-on-chip). I'm not an OS expert, but deal with a lot of forthcoming features from hardware vendors at my current role. Most are abstracted as some sorta PCI device that does a little "mailbox protocol" to get some values (perhaps directly, perhaps read out of memory upon success). Examples are HSMP from AMD and OOBMSM from Intel. In both, the OS doesn't directly configure a setting, but asks some other chunk of code (provided by the CPU vendor) to configure the setting. Mothy's argument is that that is an architectural failure, and we should create OSes that can deal with this NOC-y heterogeneous architecture.
Even if one disagrees with Mothy's premise, this is a banger of a talk, well worth watching and easy to understand.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc21/presentation/fri-key...