Design and implementation of multicore support for a highly reliable self-repairing μ-kernel OS

Abstract

As computers basically have adopted multicore processors, operating systems (OSs) support for these systems have to follow up. Since the impact of the consequences of multi-core failures affect software systems, most schedulers instead of exploiting the on-chip-based communications between cores on one die, they distribute tasks over multiple dies to reduce recovery time in case of single die failure. The full exploitation of multicore features within a die is best met by developing a highly reliable, fault-tolerant OS. MINIX3 is a highly reliable, self-repairing multiserver microkernel OS, but it doesn't support multicore architectures. This paper presents a proposed design and implementation of modifications to MINIX3 to support multicore architectures. Also, the paper presents the results of the experiments that have been conducted to evaluate the modified MINIX3 considering three issues: reliability, the performance of the multicore port, and contention on the locking scheme.