Operating system support to an online hardware-software co-design scheduler for heterogeneous multicore architectures

This paper aims at designing and implementing a scheduler model for heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures based on software and hardware. As a proof of concept, the scheduler model was applied to the Linux operating system running on the SPARC Leon3 processor. In this sense, performance monitors have been implemented within the processors, which identify demands of processes in real-time. For each process, its demand is projected for the other processors in the architecture and then, it is performed a balancing to maximize the total system performance by distributing processes among processors. The Hungarian maximization algorithm, used in balancing scheduler was developed in hardware, and provides greater parallelism and performance in the execution of the algorithm. 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.