- K42
K42 is an
open-source researchoperating system for cache-coherent 64-bit multiprocessor systems. It was developed primarily atIBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in collaboration withUniversity of Toronto andUniversity of New Mexico . The main focus of this OS is to address performance and scalability issues of system software on large-scale,shared memory , NUMA multiprocessor computers.K42 utilizes a
microkernel architecture rather than the traditional monolithic kernel design. K42 consists of a small exception-handling component that serves as the microkernel, a fast IPC mechanism calledprotected procedure call (PPC), and servers for most other components of the operating system. These servers exist in separate address spaces and rely upon the fast IPC mechanism for communication with the microkernel and other servers.History
The core of K42 is based on the
University of Toronto 's [http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~tornado Tornado] Operating System. K42 is the university's third generation of research on scalable operating systems. Tornado OS / [http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/parallel/parallel/NUMA.Welcome.html NUMAchine Multiprocessor] was the second generation and [http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/parallel/hurricane.html Hurricane OS] / [http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/parallel/hector.html Hector Multiprocessor] was the first generation.Features
K42 currently supports the
Linux PPC64 and PPC32 ABIs, so most PowerPC Linux binaries can run on K42 without modification, including the DB2 relational database. K42 has some device drivers implemented specifically for it, but it gets most of its hardware support by directly linking in Linux device drivers to a special server.Another goal of the K42 design is to achieve a customizable and maintainable system. Being built with an object-oriented design, it allows applications to customize and thus optimize the OS services required, and then on the fly
hot swap kernel object implementations. This is particularly important for applications, such as databases and web servers, where the ability to control physical resources can improve performance.External links
* [http://www.research.ibm.com/K42 Official webpage]
* [http://k42.ozlabs.org/Wiki/ K42 Wiki]
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