On micro-kernel construction

Liedtke, Jochen

doi:10.1145/224056.224075

Cited by 378 publications

(170 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…As a result of a sequence of research efforts, second generation microkernels featured with high IPC performance have been designed and implemented. Most notable example is L4 microkernel family [13], including L4/Fiasco, L4Ka::Pistachio, and NICTA::L4-embedded and so on.…”

Section: Microkernel Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Scalable Physical Memory Allocation Scheme for L4 Microkernel

Tian

Waddington

Kuang

2012

2012 IEEE 36th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

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L4 microkernel family has become very successful on mobile devices. However, with the rapid shift from uniprocessor to multicore and manycore processor, many critical OS functions including physical memory allocator (PMA) must be re-designed in order to achieve better system throughput. While research and engineering efforts have been made for PMA in monolithic kernels such as Linux, not much work can be found for L4 microkernels. Due to the the design difference, the PMA in L4 microkernels is part of user level page fault handler (a.k.a. pager), which is executed as a stand-alone server in the least privilege mode. Memory allocation and free requests are handled through inter-process communication (IPC) rather than normal system or kernel function calls. In this work, we first study the scalability issue of the PMA implementation in L4 microkernels, and propose our solution in the context of Fiasco.OC, a state-of-the-art L4 microkernel implementation. We also discuss how to leverage the L4 microkernel design advantages to implement a PMA with more advanced features, such as load balancing, customizability and NUMA-awareness. Finally, we conduct experiments to verify the scalability result of our solution. The experiment is conducted on a 48-core AMD magny-cours server.

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Section: Microkernel Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Scalable Physical Memory Allocation Scheme for L4 Microkernel

Tian

Waddington

Kuang

2012

2012 IEEE 36th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

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“…Traditional microkernels include Mach [4] and L4 [16]. fos is designed as a microkernel and extends the microkernel design ideas.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An operating system for multicore and clouds

Wentzlaff

Gruenwald

Beckmann

et al. 2010

Proceedings of the 1st ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing

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Cloud computers and multicore processors are two emerging classes of computational hardware that have the potential to provide unprecedented compute capacity to the average user. In order for the user to effectively harness all of this computational power, operating systems (OSes) for these new hardware platforms are needed. Existing multicore operating systems do not scale to large numbers of cores, and do not support clouds. Consequently, current day cloud systems push much complexity onto the user, requiring the user to manage individual Virtual Machines (VMs) and deal with many system-level concerns. In this work we describe the mechanisms and implementation of a factored operating system named fos. fos is a single system image operating system across both multicore and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud systems. fos tackles OS scalability challenges by factoring the OS into its component system services. Each system service is further factored into a collection of Internet-inspired servers which communicate via messaging. Although designed in a manner similar to distributed Internet services, OS services instead provide traditional kernel services such as file systems, scheduling, memory management, and access to hardware. fos also implements new classes of OS services like fault tolerance and demand elasticity. In this work, we describe our working fos implementation, and provide early performance measurements of fos for both intra-machine and inter-machine operations.

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“…A system using the former method would be Mach [4], or Exokernel [3] or L4 [5]. The latter method is installed in various Unix systems, including Solaris and FreeBSD.…”

Section: A Proposal For a Kernel External Threadmentioning

confidence: 99%

A kernel thread running on the outside of the kernel and its implementation

Tada

Fukuda

Suzuka

et al. 2003

Systems & Computers in Japan

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SUMMARYIn this paper, the authors propose a kernel-mode thread that runs independently of the kernel and external to the operating system, then discuss its implementation and scope of application. Using a test system running FreeBSD 2.2.5 on an IBM PC, the authors were able to create a new thread that had virtually no impact on the Unix system. This external thread and the Unix system are executed via the meta-scheduler using round-robin scheduling that allows for CPU preemption. The external thread runs over an interval of several tens of milliseconds, that is periodically in real time. In addition, by making a few changes to the Unix kernel, this interval can be reduced to 1 millisecond, and so can be used for continuous multimedia processing and robot control. This system is superior in terms of how it acquires control from the Unix system. Because control is acquired using the kernel function timeout(), programming the external thread is easier to do compared to other systems. Using this system, the authors created a system that visualizes the states of memory maps for designated processes and periodic monitoring of Unix process states. The system operates reliably, and in the future the authors plan to evaluate various uses for it.

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On micro-kernel construction

Cited by 378 publications

References 30 publications

A Scalable Physical Memory Allocation Scheme for L4 Microkernel

A Scalable Physical Memory Allocation Scheme for L4 Microkernel

An operating system for multicore and clouds

A kernel thread running on the outside of the kernel and its implementation

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