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Linux May Need a Rewrite Beyond 48 Cores
An anonymous reader writes "There is interesting new research coming out of MIT which suggests current operating systems are struggling with the addition of more cores to the CPU. It appears that the problem, which affects the available memory in a chip when multiple cores are working on the same chunks of data, is getting worse and may be hitting a peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 cores, when entirely new operating systems will be needed, the report says. Luckily, we aren't anywhere near 48 cores and there is some time left to come up with a new Linux (Windows?)."
Seems a little silly to make that distinction here, since he's clearly talking about the kernel and the way it handles SMP, which ... is not GNU.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I attended a talk by one of the technical MS VPs at Oregon State University, where he talked about the challenges of scaling up to massively multi-core machines. His talk basically covered the various SMP/NUMA optimizations that Linux has had for a while, and how Win7's kernel has been adapted to do the same things as Linux in these situations. Notably, a section of the talk was dedicated to NUMA and how massively SMP systems start to have the same kinds of memory access problems as NUMA systems.
Very cool guy; got to chat with him after the talk about Wine and various Windows technologies, etc.
tl;dr Win7 is roughly at the same spot as Linux WRT scheduling and scaling for NUMA/massive SMP systems.
~ C.