Abstract
The ideas behind the L4 microkernel were born back in the mid-1990’s when Jochen Liedtke reexamined the design of the earlier generation microkernels around Mach. Trying to prove that a minimal kernel can still provide high system performance, he developed first L3, then L4. The fundamental principle of his microkernels is that a concept will only be allowed inside the kernel, if user-land implementations would be unable to achieve the required functionality. This leads to truly minimalist kernels supporting only address spaces, threads and interprocess communication. These basic services are enough to run isolated user-level processes on top of L4. Any additional functionality must be implemented as a server process. This includes components like file systems, networking and even device drivers, all of which are usually subsumed as an operating system personality.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Atlas A, Bestavros A (1998) Statistical rate monotonic scheduling. In: Proceedings of the IEEE real-time systems symposium (RTSS), p 123
Demo CD (2006) URL http://demo.tudos.org/
Feske N, Härtig H (2003) Demonstration of DOpE – a window server for real-time and embedded systems. In: 24th IEEE real-time systems symposium (RTSS), Cancun, Mexico, pp 74–77
Hamann CJ, Löser J, Reuther L, Schönberg S, Wolter J, Härtig H (2001) Quality assuring scheduling – deploying stochastic behavior to improve resource utilization. In: 22nd IEEE real-time systems symposium (RTSS), London, UK
Hamann CJ, Roitzsch M, Reuther L, Wolter J, Härtig H (2007) Probabilistic admission control to govern real-time systems under overload. In: Proceedings of the 19th euromicro conference on real-time systems (ECRTS 07), Pisa, Italy, URL http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/papers_ps/hamann07-qrms.pdf
Härtig H, Hohmuth M, Liedtke J, Schönberg S, Wolter J (1997) The performance of μ-kernel-based systems. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on operating system principles (SOSP), Saint-Malo, France, pp 66–77
Härtig H, Baumgartl R, Borriss M, Hamann CJ, Hohmuth M, Mehnert F, Reuther L, Schönberg S, Wolter J (1998a) DROPS: OS support for distributed multimedia applications. In: Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGOPS European workshop, Sintra, Portugal
Härtig H, Hohmuth M, Wolter J (1998b) Taming Linux. In: Proceedings of the 5th annual Australasian conference on parallel and real-time systems (PART ’98), Adelaide, Australia
Härtig H, Zschaler S, Ronald MP, Aigner, Göbel S, Pohl C, Röttger S (2007) Enforceable component-based realtime contracts: Supporting realtime properties from software development to execution. Real-Time Syst 35(1):1–31
Hildebrand D (1992) An architectural overview of QNX. In: 1st USENIX workshop on micro-kernels and other kernel architectures, Seattle, WA, pp 113–126
Liedtke J, Härtig H, Hohmuth M (1997) OS-controlled cache predictability for real-time systems. In: Third IEEE real-time technology and applications symposium (RTAS), Montreal, Canada, pp 213–223
Lin KJ, Natarajan S, Liu JWS (1987) Imprecise results: Utilizing partial computations in real-time systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE real-time system symposium (RTSS), San Jose, CA, pp 210–217
Loeser J, Härtig H (2004) Low-latency hard real-time communication over switched ethernet. In: Proceedings of the 16th euromicro conference on real-time systems (ECRTS), Catania, Italy, pp 13–22
Mehnert F, Hohmuth M, Härtig H (2002) Cost and benefit of separate address spaces in real-time operating systems. In: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE real-time systems symposium (RTSS), Austin, Texas, pp 124–133
Peter M, Schild H, Lackorzynski A, Warg A (2009) Virtual machines jailed: Virtualization in systems with small trusted computing bases. In: VDTS ’09: Proceedings of the 1st EuroSys workshop on virtualization technology for dependable systems, ACM, Nuremberg, Germany, pp 18–23, DOI http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/ 1518684.1518688
Reuther L, Pohlack M (2003) Rotational-position-aware real-time disk scheduling using a dynamic active subset (DAS). In: 24th IEEE real-time systems symposium (RTSS), Cancun, Mexico, pp 374–385
Schild H, Lackorzynski A, Warg A (2009) Faithful virtualization on a real-time operating system. In: Proceedings of the 11th real-time Linux workshop, Dresden, Germany
Yodaiken V, Barabanov M (1997) A real-time linux. In: Proceedings of the Linux applications development and deployment conference (USELINUX), The USENIX Association, Anaheim, CA
Acknowledgements
We want to thank all our colleagues at TU Dresden who participated in the work presented. Most notably we thank Michael Hohmuth, Jean Wolter and Sebastian Schönberg for their work on Fiasco and the initial L{ 4}Linux, Adam Lackorzynski for his constant maintainership of L{ 4}Linux and his extensive work on system components, Norman Feske for his work on the DOpE window server, Jork Löser for the real-time network theory and infrastructure, Martin Pohlack and Lars Reuther for the real-time disk scheduler and Claude-Joachim Hamann for his work on scheduling theory. We furthermore thank Ronald Aigner, Robert Baumgartl, Martin Borriss, Frank Mehnert, Udo Steinberg, Michael Peter, Henning Schild and of course Jochen Liedtke. We want to extend our thanks to our friends in the L4 community: the L4 groups in Karlsruhe and in Sydney. Our work was supported by the DFG in SFB 358, by several grants from Intel and by the European Union in the ROBIN and OpenTC projects.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Härtig, H., Roitzsch, M. (2012). As Time Goes By: Research on L4-Based Real-Time Systems. In: Chakraborty, S., Eberspächer, J. (eds) Advances in Real-Time Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24349-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24349-3_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24348-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24349-3
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)