The Hardware Abstraction Layer of Nanvix for the Kalray MPPA-256 Lightweight Manycore Processor

Pedro Henrique Penna (1, 2) , Davidson Francis , João Souto (3)

1 UGA [2016-2019] - Université Grenoble Alpes [2016-2019]
2 PUC Minas - Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais
3 UFSC - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina = Federal University of Santa Catarina [Florianópolis]

Lightweight manycores stand out for their performance, but lack on programmability and software portability. While these challenges may be tackled at Operating System (OS) level, existing systems that are narrowed for this context require some redesign, due to architectural intricacies that they do not completely handle. In this scenario, we introduce a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for lightweight manycores that cope with key issues that are often encountered when designing an OS for these processors. We present the interface exposed by our HAL, as well as a discussion about its implementation for the Kalray MPPA-256 manycore.

Mots clés: HAL; Operating System; Lightweight Manycore; Kalray MPPA-256

Domaines: Système d'exploitation [cs.OS]

Pedro Henrique Penna, Davidson Francis, João Souto. The Hardware Abstraction Layer of Nanvix for the Kalray MPPA-256 Lightweight Manycore Processor. Conférence d'Informatique en Parallélisme, Architecture et Système, Jun 2019, Anglet, France. ⟨hal-02151274⟩