[Beowulf] Any open source OS like IBM's CNK?

[Lawrence Stewart]

On 2014, Apr 11, at 12:30 PM, C. Bergström <cbergstrom at pathscale.com> wrote:

> On 04/11/14 10:52 PM, Mark Hahn wrote:
>>> I'm exploring tiny OS, in-house homebrew and anything non-heavy (aka linux) for Xeon PHI. Does anyone on the list know of any open source work for
>> 
>> I'm curious what you think the win will be.
>> 
> Good question - I'd call this project more "for fun" than anything else at this point.
> 
> Hopefully it will allow us to easily test different on-card schedulers. (We are already working on userland (host) scheduling). I've seen numerous cases where "linux" doesn't scale well on many-core systems.
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The MIT PDOS group has been fixing Linux, one scalability bug at a time, for years.  
Recently they have a new scheme for wholesale improvements, that is worth a look.

See http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/commuter/

Nutshell - properties of the system call interface can make scalable implementations 
either possible or not.  The data also suggests system calls to avoid.

I'll argue that there is no real reason to think a new kernel will be more scalable than linux.
It is relatively easy to make one smaller, but if you can fix the scalability problems, why not
fix them for everyone?

-Larry