Here is a paper from MIT that discusses scalability of Linux OS to multicore CPUs.
Abstract
This paper analyzes the scalability of seven system applications (Exim, memcached, Apache, PostgreSQL, gmake, Psearchy, and MapReduce) running on Linux on a 48-core computer. Except for gmake, all applications trigger scalability bottlenecks inside a recent Linux kernel. Using mostly standard parallel programming techniques—this paper introduces one new technique, sloppy counters—these bottlenecks can be removed from the kernel or avoided by changing the applications slightly. Modifying the kernel required in total 3002 lines of code changes. A speculative conclusion from this analysis is that there is no scalability reason to give up on traditional operating system organizations just yet.
1 response so far ↓
1 Embedded Linux is Not the Multicore Answer « Concrete Multicore Blog // Oct 6, 2010 at 3:22 am
[...] claim that Linux does not scale for multicore processors. At first, I thought that was the topic of this article. What the research paper really says is there are bottlenecks for most major Linux applications [...]
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