Multicore requires OS rewrites? Well, maybe
A Microsoft kernel engineer, Dave Probert, gave a presentation last week outlining his thoughts on how the Windows kernel should evolve to meet the needs of the multicore future ahead of us. Probert complained that current operating systems fail to capitalize on the capabilities of multicore processors and leave users waiting. "Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?" he asked.
Probert said that a future OS should not look like Windows or Linux currently do. In particular, he targeted the way current OSes share processor cores between multiple applications. He suggested that in multicore OSes, cores would instead be dedicated to particular processes, with the OS acting more as a hypervisor; assigning processes to cores, but then leaving them alone to do their thing. It might then be possible to abandon current abstractions like protected memory—abstractions that are necessary in large part due to the sharing of processor resources between multiple programs and the operating system itself
