Correct, fast, maintainable: choose any three!

Authors:
Bernard Blackham;Gernot Heiser
Affiliations:
NICTA and University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;NICTA and University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Venue:
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems
Year:
2012

Citing 4
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Abstract

The common-case IPC handler in microkernels, referred to as the fastpath, is performance-critical and thus is often optimised using hand-written assembly. However, compiler technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, which suggests that we should re-evaluate this approach. We present a case study of optimising the IPC fast-path in the seL4 microkernel. This fastpath is written in C and relies on an optimising C compiler for good performance. We present our techniques in modifying the C sources to assist with compiler optimisation. We compare our results with a hand-optimised assembly implementation, which gains no extra benefit from hand-tuning.