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.
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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.
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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
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