LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015

Heterogeneous systems offer tremendous flexibility in terms of matching of compute resources to the actual task, including huge number of cores, different CPU architectures bound by some interconnect, and so on. The upper possibilities apply also a number of challenges to the originally-monolithic Linux architecture.

Hydra project aims to mitigate the most severe issues, without drastic redesign or micro-kernel migration; it adds necessary tweaks to the kernel, to enable it to run several kernels (each of the appropriate architecture, in heterogeneous case). State synchronization is handled using kexec/remoteproc/rpmsg/virtio frameworks, adapted for extended needs.

The talk will cover architecture and current state of the project, as well as broader set of tasks, that this generic heterogeneous framework aims to address.