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On μ-Kernel Construction.md

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On μ-Kernel Construction

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~awang/courses/cop5611_s2004/microkernel.pdf

Jochen Liedtke

Summary

  • It is believed that micro-kernel based systems are inefficient and not sufficiently flexible
  • Liedtke shows and supports by documentary evidence that inefficiency and inflexibility is due to improper implementation, and not due to the basic idea being unsound.

Rationale

  • Kernel: part of the operating system that is common to all other software.
  • Micro-kernel: minimize the kernel (i.e. to implement outside the kernel whatever possible)

Micro-kernel concepts

  • Independence: Any subsystem S can be implemented in a way such that it cannot be affected or corrupted by another subsystem S'
  • Integrity: There must be a way for S1 and S2 to communicate using a channel that cannot be affected or eavesdropped by S'

Micro-kernel primitives

Address spaces

Micro-kernel hides the hardware concept of address spaces. Microkernel provides three operations for building address spaces on top of foundational address space.

  • Grant: allows the owner of an address space to grant any of its pages to another address space.
  • Map: allows an owner of an address space to map any of its pages into another address space.
  • Flush: allows owner of address space to remove pages from other address spaces that received the page.

Threads and IPC

  • Thread: activity executing inside an address space.
  • IPC (aka. cross-address-space communication) is handled by micro-kernel.
  • Interrupts are modeled as IPC messages. The hardware is regarded as a set of threads with special thread ids and empty messages.

Unique identifiers

  • Micro-kernel must provide unique IDs for something: either threads, tasks or communication channels.

Performance, facts and rumors

Kernel-user switch

  • Bare machine-instructions required for entering kernel mode add up to 107 cycles.
  • Kernels measured require ~ 900 cycles to enter kernel mode => ~800 cycle kernel overhead.
  • L3 micro-kernel cost for kernel-user switch is 123 cycles => Very close to the minimum number of cycles required.

Address space switch

  • The main cost of address space switch is cost of flushing TLB
  • Not a problem with architectures that have address-space tagged TLBs, because flushing TLB is not necessary.
  • Exploit hardware features for avoding TLB flushes, such as segment registers in PowerPC and x86.
  • Protection domains can be implemented using segment registers instead of actual address space switches. For this reason, there is no need to flush the TLB.
  • Expensive context-switching in some existing micro-kernels is due to bad implementation, and not inherent problems with concept of micro-kernel.

Thread switches and IPC

  • Measured various OSs and showed that micro-kernels are at least 2 times faster.
  • Proved by construction that a 10 micro-second RPC call is achievable.

Memory Effects

  • Properly constructed micro-kernel automatically avoid memory system degradation because working set of micro-kernel is small.