LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America

NPS-400 is a 256 cores and 4,096 hardware threads SoC running SMP Linux built to process 400 Gbps of network traffic in a Linux user space application. Building Linux support for it touched on several architectural issues that are of interest to the Linux developer community at large as massively multi-core systems becomes more common place. This talk will focus on what happens when you have enough CPUs to dedicate a CPU per task and the balance shifts from scheduling CPU time slices to keeping the OS from interfering with a user process running on a dedicated CPU assigned solely to it. Topics covered include CPU isolation, IPI and work queue cross CPU interference and the dynamic tick feature.

The talk will be useful to engineers working to lower the latency and jitter of real time CPU bound applications and kernel developers interested in enabling Linux to serve these needs.