Corey: An Operating System for Many Cores

Multiprocessor application performance can be limited by the operating system when the application uses the operating system frequently and the operating system services use data structures shared and modified by multiple processing cores. If the application does not need the sharing, then the operating system will become an unnecessary bottleneck to the application's performance. This paper argues that applications should control sharing: the kernel should arrange each data structure so that only a single processor need update it, unless directed otherwise by the application.