Reconfigurable hardware assist for linux process scheduling in heterogeneous multicore SoCs

Abstract

This paper presents a model of an FPGA-based scheduler which identifies the processes’ demands and indicates to the Linux operating system running over SPARC Leon the most suited set of processes to each core type. In this regard, performance monitors were implemented within the processors, which in real-time identifies the demands of processes. The demand for each process is projected for the other processors in the architecture, and then it is executed a balancing to maximize the total system performance by distributing processes among processors. The scheduler has been validated through the parallel execution of several benchmarks, resulting in decreased execution times compared to the scheduler without the heterogeneity support.