An architecture of operating system utilizing non-volatile main memory and heterogeneous multi-core

Abstract

Reducing power consumption is a serious issue for today's computer systems. The measure to that issue, nonvolatile memory (NVM) and heterogeneous multicore architecture (HMA) draw attention. Non-volatile memory is the device that can maintain data without continuous power supply. This nonvolatile memory enable to reduce power consumption of main memory and zero-overhead hibernation. Heterogeneous multi-core architectures combine different cores. The cores are different each other in terms of instruction set architecture, circuit size and so on. Combination of various characteristics has significant possibility to achieve energy-efficient computer system. For the above reasons, combination of NVM and HMA enable to reduce power consumption of today's computer systems. Assuming using non volatile main memory, Operating System (OS) must be strict about memory management. Because, running time of OS go longer and risk of memory leaks get higher. In addition, code quality of OS must be high. To keep code quality, strong typing is useful. However C, which is mainstream of OS implementation, do not have mechanism avoid memory leak and strong typing mechanism. To solve this issue, there are some researches of implementing OS in Java have many case. However, previous works have certain performance problem. To solve this, we propose a new operating system architecture. This architecture aims that native machine code run as user programs while OS kernel is implemented in java. In this paper, we describe proposed architecture, explain a preliminary implementation of it, and show experiment by that implementation.