Subordinate Kernels: Application Offloading in Asymmetric Multi-Processor Systems

Modern computing systems incorporate a plethora of auxiliary processing cores located on devices such as graphics cards, network devices and raid controllers. These processors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and could provide application offloading if exploitable by third party code. However, to provide an environment for practical general purpose application offloading, the operating system must present a homogeneous programming interface across the heterogeneous processors and provide a safe execution environment. In this paper we present a subordinate kernel operating system structure as a means of practical and safe execution of third party application code on auxiluary processing cores. We expand this concept of subordinate kernels by describing a proof of concept design of application offloading in the Singularity research