MoonlessNights's Journal: Heterogeneous Multi-Processing on big.LITTLE ARM

I am really interested in the possibilities offered via Odroid-XU3. It is possibly the first general-use ARM machine using the big.LITTLE (this one is 4x 2GHz Cortex-A15 and 4x 1.4 GHz Cortex-A7 in one package) design which I have seen for public sale. Previous examples I have seen (other users of Exynos5 SoC) have not been easily adapted for uses beyond their specific deployments.

Unfortunately, I am having trouble finding a concise answer to some questions I have regarding how the scheduler even manages this situation (since schedulers have historically assumed homogeneous computational resources): (thread on Odroid forums). This seems like a really fascinating technical challenge so it would be interesting to hear more details of how this solution has been approached.

Seems like an impressive system but I do still hope we will start seeing these kinds of machines built with more memory, in the near future. 2G is a little on the tight side (of course, wanting to use one of these as a primary home system is probably an unusual use-case, anyway).