A study on asymmetric operating systems on symmetric multiprocessors

Abstract

This paper proposes a technique to achieve asymmetric multiple OSes environment for symmetric multiprocessors. The system has a host OS and guest OSes: L4 microkernel and their servers run as the host OS, and modified Linux runs as the guest OS. OS manager which is one of the servers on the host OS manages the guest OSes. Our approach avoids a lot of execution overheads and modification costs of the guest OSes because the each OS can control hardware directly without any virtualization. The results of the evaluation show that our system is much better than the existing virtual machine systems in point of the performance. In addition, a guest OS in our system requires a few amount of modification costs. Consequently, the experiments prove that our system is a practical approach for both performance and engineering cost sensitive systems. © IFIP International Foderation for Information Processing 2007.