hoangt/m3

Microkernel-based system for heterogeneous manycores

M³

This is the official repository of M³: microkernel-based system for heterogeneous manycores [1]. M³ is intended for platforms with very heterogeneous cores and in particular, simple accelerators not able to run an OS kernel (e.g., DSPs, FPGAs, accelerators for specific workloads, etc., but also general purpose cores like ARM and x86 cores). The goal is to provide spatial isolation and access to operating-system services on all cores, i.e., treat all cores as first-class citizens. This is achieved by abstracting the heterogeneity of the cores via a common hardware component per core, called data transfer unit (DTU). The DTU offers all features that are required to treat a core as first-class citizen. The most important features are secure message passing and remote memory access.

To support very heterogeneous platforms, M³ runs the kernel on a dedicated core and lets the applications run on the other cores. That is, no applications are running on the kernel core and no kernel is running on the application cores. To control an application, a kernel controls its DTU remotely, i.e., controls the communication capabilities, because remote resources (other cores, external memories, etc.) can only be accessed via the DTU.

Supported Platforms:

Currently, M³ runs on the following platforms:

• Tomahawk 2 [2], a silicon chip containing 9 Xtensa cores that can be used by M³, each a small scratchpad memory (about 64 KiB) instead of a cache. Due to the small scratchpad memory and the missing memory protection, traditional operating-systems like Linux are not supported.
• The next generation of Tomahawk, currently only available as a SystemC-based simulator.
• Linux, by using it as a virtual machine to simulate the DTU and the principal behaviour of the envisioned platform.
• gem5. We have added a DTU model to it to make M³ run on gem5.

Note that, for both Tomahawk platforms, the Xtensa toolchain and specific core configurations are required, which are not freely available. M³ uses a private git submodule at hw/th for it, which can just stay empty if gem5 or Linux are used.

Getting Started:

Preparations:

Tomahawk

The cross-compiler for Xtensa needs to be build first. This is described in cross/README. Furthermore, the submodule in hw/th needs to be pulled in:

$ git submodule init
$ GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -l <yourname>" git submodule update hw/th

It is assumed, that you have already installed both the 4.0.2 and 5.0.5 version of the Xtensa toolchain (into the same directory). Finally, you need to copy the hw/th/config.ini.sample to hw/th/config.ini and change it accordingly.

gem5

The submodule in hw/gem5 needs to be pulled in and built:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update hw/gem5
$ cd hw/gem5
$ scons build/X86/gem5.opt build/X86/gem5.debug

Building:

Before you build M³, you should choose your target platform and the build-mode by exporting the corresponding environment variables. For example:

$ export M3_BUILD=release M3_TARGET=gem5

Now, M³ can be built by using the script b:

$ ./b

Running:

On all platforms, scenarios can be run by starting the desired boot script in the directory boot, e.g.:

$ ./b run boot/hello.cfg

Note that this command ensures that everything is up to date as well. For more information, run

$ ./b -h

References:

[1] Nils Asmussen, Marcus Völp, Benedikt Nöthen, Hermann Härtig, and Gerhard Fettweis. M3: A Hardware/Operating-System Co-Design to Tame Heterogeneous Manycores. To appear in the proceedings of the Twenty-first International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, April 2016.

[2] Oliver Arnold, Emil Matus, Benedikt Nöthen, Markus Winter, Torsten Limberg, and Gerhard Fettweis. Tomahawk: Parallelism and Heterogeneity in Communications Signal Processing MPSoCs. ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 13(3s):107:1–107:24, March 2014.