An infrastructure for multiprocessor run-time adaptation

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2007

Designing and implementing system software so that it scales well on shared-memory multiprocessors (SMMPs) has proven to be surprisingly challenging. To improve scalability, most designers to date have focused on concurrency by iteratively eliminating the need for locks and reducing lock contention. However, our experience indicates that locality is just as, if not more, important and that focusing on locality ultimately leads to a more scalable system.

Operating Systems Review, 2008

Foreword experience with at least six different previous operating systems of the merit of technologies investigated in K42, and an extrapolation of the implications of that experience to the wider operating system community.

Operating Systems Review, 2006

K42 is an open-source scalable research operating system well suited to support systems research. The primary goals of K42's design that support such research include flexibility to allow a multitude of policies and implementations to be supported simultaneously, extensibility to allow new policies and implementations to be readily added, and scalability to enable good performance for both small and large applications on both small and large multiprocessor systems. The goals are accomplished via key features including an objectoriented structure that allows specialized resource management implementations and policies on a per-resource, perapplication basis, implementation in user-level servers of much of the system functionality, and a sophisticated set of underlying services that provides a programming model for developing system software in a scalable and modular fashion.