Thread Dispatching in Barrelfish

Abstract: Current computer systems are becoming more and more complex. Even commodity computers nowadays have multiple cores while heterogeneous systems are about to become the mainstream computer architecture. Parallelism, synchronization and scaling are thus becoming issues of grave importance that need to be addressed efficiently. In environments like that, creating dedicated software and Operating Systems is becoming a difficulty for performance enhancement. Developing code for just a specific machine can prove to be both expensive and wasteful since technology advances with such speed that what is considered state-of-the-art today becomes quickly obsolete. The Multikernel schema and its implementation, the Barrelfish OS, target a group of different architectures and environments even when these environments “co-exist" on the same system. We present a different approach on loading and executing programs and using our new scheduling policy we handle tasks rather than threads, balancing work-load and developing a dynamic environment with respect to scaling and performance. Our goal is to use our findings in order to establish a more controlled way to use resources.