The design and implementation of the Lavender micro kernel

✍ Scribed by Koichi Mouri; Eiji Okubo

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 188 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0882-1666
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-684x(200007)31:7<47::aid-scj6>3.0.co;2-v

✦ Synopsis

Micro kernel architecture is widely used in the design of operating systems. However, traditional micro kernels are not easily extensible and so are not very flexible. For example, the granularity of kernel functions does not accord with the users needs. Moreover, users cannot customize kernel functions easily. Another problem of micro kernels is that system performance is poor due to the overhead of switching address spaces and due to the increased interprocess communication in micro kernels. To address these problems, we have designed and implemented the Lavender micro kernel. Lavender is a micro kernel which can be customized according to application-specific requirements. In order to reduce kernel overhead due to switching address spaces and interprocess communication, Lavender provides users with functionality for process groups and for resident address space. By means of this functionality, the overhead of interprocess procedure calls is reduced to about one-fifth that of other micro kernels. In this paper, the structure and features of Lavender are described. Furthermore, a performance evaluation of process groups and resident address space is presented and the effectiveness of Lavender is discussed.