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Let’s face it. Most of the gear you use at work or play has multicore processors in it. Your laptop has them (the CPU itself has two cores, and the dedicated graphics processor has many more). That game console in the living room has still more, and even a high-end smartphone typically has a CPU and graphics core on a single chip. Out of sight but definitely not out of mind–particularly if they cease working–are the servers and high-throughput network routers, all which have numerous multicore processors in them. The multiple cores in these devices work in concert to provide quick responses to user queries or to manage the smooth flow of data throughout the office.

Most multiprocessing systems can be classified as either symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) or asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP). AMP involves the use of interprocessor communication to combine the efforts of multiple processors, each with its own local operating system and hardware resources. Also, AMP involves less OS overhead for each individual processor and a more traditional execution environment for applications. AMP seems like distributed system. The number of peripherals that are supported in today's multicore processors is quickly increasing. Symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) software is expected to be quickly available to support these peripherals. Basically any OS can be ported to a SMP platform, but the developers must take care of following issues for SMP OS. - Handling of task priority or implicit synchronization - Spinlocks and synchronization - Synchronization between tasks sharing memory - Synchronization between tasks and ISRs sharing memory - Synchronization between ISRs sharing memory