FROM EDN EUROPE: OS steps up to support proliferating multi-core CPUs
by Graham Prophet -- EDN, January 5, 2006
In recognition of the rapidly-growing interest in multi-core processor designs, QNX has introduced a Multi-Core Edition of its development tools. The company asserts that the structure of its operating system software lends itself to multi-core processing and enables it to offer support for all multiprocessing models—the package is a combination of existing products with some changes to the OS kernel. With the software you will be able to migrate existing code to a multi-processor environment.QNX will support both asymmetric and symmetric models: in the former, multiple OS instances—not necessarily the same OS—will run, one on each physical processor instance. Resources are fully managed between the OSs—QNX notes that interrupts need special care in this respect. In symmetric processing, a single instance of the OS runs on multiple CPU cores. You can migrate existing applications progressively, initially allocating specific tasks to specific CPU cores, then moving to a symmetric multiprocessing model later. You can also use a new mode called Bound multiprocessing in which you allocate critical tasks and threads, or tasks written for single-core operation that you do not wish to re-write, to a given processor where they will run in their own space. The software can perform controlled or dynamic load balancing around this type of allocation, at run-time. Multi-core technology is coming, and not just for out-and-out power reasons, QNX says. The company is also finding applications in mobile systems where having multiple cores running at lower clock speeds yields a better overall power budget.
QNX, www.qnx.com.
