A high performance Kernel-Less Operating System architecture

  • Authors:

  • Amit Vasudevan;Ramesh Yerraballi;Ashish Chawla

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington TX;University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington TX;University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington TX

  • Venue:
  • ACSC '05 Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Australasian conference on Computer Science - Volume 38
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Operating Systems provide services that are accessed by processes via mechanisms that involve a ring transition to transfer control to the kernel where the required function is performed. This has one significant drawback that every service call involves an overhead of a context switch where processor state is saved and a protection domain transfer is performed. However, as we discovered, it is possible, on processor architectures that support segmentation, to achieve a significant performance gain in accessing the services provided by the operating system by not performing a ring transition. Further, such gains can be achieved without compromising on the separation of the privileged components from the unprivileged. KLOS is a Kernel-Less Operating System built on the basis of such a design. The KLOS service call mechanism is an order of magnitude faster than the current widely implemented mechanisms for service or system calls with a 4x improvement over the traditional trap/interrupt and a 2x improvement over the Intel SYSENTER/SYSEXIT fast system call models.