A survey of customizability in operating systems research
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
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We describe a set of efficient cross-domain mechanisms that allow operating systems to be implemented as cooperating applications, eliminating the need for a monolithic kernel. Our implementation, called SPACE, can achieve higher-performance than kernel-based systems by allowing applications to build customized system services and tailor system interfaces for performance. On the SPARC architecture we have measured minimal application-to-application system service calls that are 5 times faster than Solaris getpid(), and customized thread creation that is 50 times faster than minimal Solaris threads. SPACE unifies exception handling and cross-domain calls into a single mechanism that allows applications to efficiently interface to the underlying hardware. Conventional memory-management hardware is used to provide multiple protection domains within each address space. Cross-domain calls are implemented by portals, which map an exception in one domain to a handler in another. Portals are accessible on a per-domain basis, providing capability-based access to system services. The portals are implemented by synthesizing code according to templates for each portal type. The portal types are designed to minimize state saving and eliminate the dynamic binding overhead of generic cross-domain implementations.