On Kernel Construction

Jochen Liedtke
GMD German National Research Center for Information Technology

15th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP) December 3-6, 1995

-kernels advantages &

Early -kernels: Brinch Hansens (1970) and Hydra (1974) -kernel idea Advantages
More modular system structure Server fault isolation (independence) More flexible and tailorable

 problems
Most existing -kernels have bad performance Bad performance Restricted flexibility Believed-to-be causes
Increased used-kernel and address-space switches

But performance studies are kernelspecific

Liedtkes Thesis
A -kernel does the job IF Properly designed and Carefully implemented Minimality Elegance Architectural integration

Efficiency Flexibility

Roadmap

Primitives that -kernels must implement Achievable flexibility Achievable performance Cost: no portability!

Primitives in a -kernel
Determining criterion: functionality
A concept is OK inside the -kernel if left outside would prevent implementation of the systems required functionality

Assume
System must support interactive and/or not completely trustworthy apps Hardware implements page-based VM

System must support

Independence Integrity

Primitives: address spaces

Address space: mapping that associates each virtual page to a physical page Why is this needed inside? Basic operations
Grant, map, flush

Primitives: Threads and IPC

Thread: an activity executing inside an address space Why is this needed inside? so cross-address (aka IPC) Note that grant and map need IPC

Primitives: Unique identifiers

UIDs for threads or tasks or comm. channels Why are uid required? Cryptography as an alternative

Flexibility
Memory manager: a server managing the initial address space is a classical MM Device driver: a process which directly access I/O ports mapped into its address space and receives messages from HW through IPC (interrupts) Remote comm.: devices drivers access comm. HW, server translated local messages to external comm. protocols Unix server: implemented by IPC

Performance
Cost of kernel-user mode switches: implementation problem Cost of address-space switches: implementation problem Memory system degradation is not inherent to the approach

Non-Portability
Portable -kernels
Cannot take advantage, Nor circumvent performance problems of specific hardware Additional layer cost in performance

Lack of portability goes beyond code

Algorithms and internal concepts

-kernels are the processor dependent basis for portable OSs