OSMark: A benchmark suite for understanding parallel scalability of operating systems on large scale multi-cores

With the development of transistor technology, multi-core has become mainstream. Predictions based on Moore´s Law state that a processor chip can accommodate thousands of cores in 5-10 years. As the system software between applications and hardware, can operating systems scale with the number of cores and achieve the performance potential? In order to answer this question, a micro-benchmark suite OSMark is designed to understand the parallel scalability of operating systems on large scale multi-cores. Different from application-oriented benchmark, OSMark works by stressing separate parts of an operating system including process management, memory management, network, file descriptor operation and System V IPC. Evaluations on AMD 32-core machine with Linux as its OS indicate that most of benchmarks in OSMark scale bad. Linux kernel source code analysis and performance data reveal that kernel synchronization primitives protecting the shared data are the main bottlenecks limiting parallel scalability.