Mint: Booting Multiple Linux Kernels on a Multicore Processor

In this paper, we describe the implementation and evaluation of the Mint operating system, which runs multiple Linux instances by partitioning cores, memory blocks, and I/O devices. The proposed method is not a type of virtualization, hence, it makes the most efficient use of available cores. By performing some evaluations, we confirmed that all OS instances in Mint have performances equal to those in the original Vanilla Linux. In addition, because all the instances are completely independent of one another, Mint will not be affected by performance issues, even under the forthcoming many-core environments. In addition, each instance is fully armored Linux. This means that users can still use existing software assets.