Scalability comparison of commodity operating systems on multi-cores

Author

Cui, Yan ; Chen, Yu ; Shi, Yuanchun ; Wu, Qingbo

Author_Institution

Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, China

fYear

2010

fDate

28-30 March 2010

Firstpage

117

Lastpage

118

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate and compare the parallel scalability of three commodity operating systems (Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD) on an AMD 32-core platform. Measurements of microbenchmarks and a real-life application reveal that no operating system scales totally better than another for microbenchmarks; for the real-life application, Linux and Solaris are competitive in scalability and perform better than FreeBSD. Related kernel source analysis and performance data suggest that synchronization primitives protecting the shared data structure in kernels are the root cause of the poor scalability on multi-cores.

Keywords

microprocessor chips; multiprocessing systems; operating systems (computers); AMD 32-core platform; FreeBSD; Linux; Solaris; commodity operating systems; microbenchmarks measurement; multicore platform; scalability comparison; Data structures; Kernel; Libraries; Linux; Operating systems; Performance analysis; Performance evaluation; Protection; Scalability; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Performance Analysis of Systems & Software (ISPASS), 2010 IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

White Plains, NY

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-6023-6

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-6024-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISPASS.2010.5452048

Filename

5452048