A case for increased operating system support in chip multi-processors

We identify the operating system as one area where a novel architecture could significantly improve on current chip multi-processor designs, allowing increased performance and improved power efficiency. We first show that the operating system contributes a non-trivial overhead to even the most computationally intense workloads and that this OS contribution grows to a significant fraction of total instructions when executing interactive applications. We then show that architectural improvements have had little to no effect on the performance of the operating system over the last 15 years. Based on these observations we propose the need for increased operating system support in chip multiprocessors. Specifically we consider the potential of a separate Operating System Processor (OSP) operating concurrently with General Purpose Processors (GPP) in a Chip Multi-Processor (CMP) organization.