A Distributed Process Management Model for Better Scalability on Multicore Platform

摘要

With the widespread utilization of multicore processors, operating systems face new challenges on scalability. The lock mechanism used by current monolithic OSs makes some critical modules encounter performance bottlenecks caused by lock contention. The contention in Linux process lifecycle management results in process Creation, execution and termination (CET) scaling poorly with core count increasing. Differing from the centralized fashion of Linux, this paper presents a Distributed process management model (DPMM) on microkernel for better scalability. The kernel functions are distributed into message passing servers running on different cores. DPMM splits the shared data including Process control blocks (PCBs), page pools and buffer caches into these cooperating servers. The actions including PCB creation/deletion, page allocation/freeing, executable loading and scheduling can be parallelized without locking. Our micro-benchmarks show that DPMM achieves nearly linear performance growth on process CET and outperforms Linux and Minix3 on a 32-Core machine.