The Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference 2013 In Kernel Switcher: A Solution to Support ARM's New big.LITTLE Implementation By Matheiu Poirer San Francisco, California The 'In Kernel Switcher' (IKS) is a solution developed by Linaro and ARM to support ARM’s new big.LITTLE implementation. It is pairing together an A7 (LITTLE) and an A15 (big) processor into a logical entity that is then presented to the kernel as one CPU. From there the solution is seeking to achieve optimal performance and power consumption by switching between the big or the LITTLE core based on system usage. This session will present the IKS solution. After giving an overview of the big.LITTLE processor we will present the solution itself, how frequencies are masqueraded to the cpufreq core, the steps involved in doing a “switch” between cores and some of the optimisation made to the interactive governor. The session will conclude by presenting the results that we obtained as well as a brief overview of Linaro's upstreaming plan.