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Experiences with Locking in a NUMA Multiprocessor Operating System Kernel


Ronald C. Unrau, Orran Krieger, Benjamin Gamsa, and Michael Stumm
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Email: unrau@eecg.toronto.edu

Abstract

We describe the locking architecture of a new operating system, Hurricane, designed for large scale shared-memory multiprocessors. Many papers already describe kernel locking techniques, and some of the techniques we use have been previously described by others. However, our work is novel in the particular combination of techniques used, as well as several of the individual techniques themselves. Moreover, it is the way the techniques work together that is the source of our performance advantages and scalability. Briefly, we use:


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