Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Run-Time Resource Management at the
Operating System Level
Patrick Bellasi, Simone Corbetta, and William Fornaciari
Abstract
Current hardware platforms provide the applications with an extended
set of physical resources, as well as a well defined set of power and performance
optimization mechanisms (i.e., hardware control knobs). The software stack, mean-
while, is responsible of taking direct advantage of these resources, in order to
meet application functional and non-functional requirements. The support from the
Operating System (OS) is of utmost importance, since it gives opportunity to optimize
the system as a whole.
Purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the challenge of manag-
ing physical and logical resources in complex multi- and many-core architectures,
focusing on emerging MPSoC platforms.
6.1
Introduction
Modern applications are of a wide variety, and they all have different requirements in
terms of hardware and software resources, performance goals, power and energy con-
straints. What we are experiencing in today's electronics is a continuous convergence
of different application classes into the same environment: life-critical, real-time,
mobile and general processor power are converging to the same System-on-Chip
(refer to Fig.
6.1
).
The increasing demand for applications and scenarios translates into an increasing
demand for processing power and integration, as it can be seen from Fig.
6.2
. This
adds several challenges to the design of such applications. In addition, to cope with
design and implementation costs, a suitable design methodology should contemplate
the re-use of part of the subsystems. In this context, the Resource Manager (RM)
should be able to operate on slightly different applications, with different resources
and with as little as possible porting efforts.
P. Bellasi (
)
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
e-mail: bellasi@elet.polimi.it
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