Effect of Microkernel Structure on Cache Memory Performance
Moon-Seok Chang, Kern Koh · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. si'seu'tem mich i'lon · 2000
The modern software technology toward modularization has changed the cache accessing behavior dramatically. Many modern operating systems are also departing from the past monolithic structure toward the highly modularized structure referred to as microkernel. Microkernel-based operating systems are more portable and extensible, but are likely to have worse performance. This paper quantitatively analyzes the effect of microkernel structure on cache memory to identify the primary factor for its performance degradation. Through the experiment performed on a Intel Pentium Pro processor platform, we found that the microkernel structure suffers from remarkably higher misses for L1, L2 cache and TLB than the monolithic one does. We also found that the performance of a microkernel is more dependent on the efficiency of cache memory than IPC. Finally, we found that these results come from the effect of frequent context switches mainly caused by the structural feature of a microkernel.