S. Oikawa, Sch. of Comput. Sci., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA
R. Rajkumar, Sch. of Comput. Sci., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Scalability of operating system kernels is important especially for real-time systems. The existing real-time kernels, however are made scalable by providing only basic functionalities; thus they often sacrifice the capability of hardware platforms. We introduce the separation of abstractions into software functionalities and hardware resources and their implementation by a scalable kernel architecture. The separation of abstractions into software and hardware are parts enables the provision of rich abstractions. Rich abstractions make it possible to exploit the capability of higher-end hardware platforms, and the separation makes it possible that their software functionalities are available also on low-end platforms. Our scalable kernel can scale up its implementation incrementally as the capability of hardware platforms scales up. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a scalable real-time kernel based on that architecture model, and show the experimental results of a prototype implementation.
Index Terms:
operating system kernels; real-time kernel; scalability; operating system kernels; real-time systems; software functionalities; hardware resources; scalable kernel architecture; abstractions
Citation:
S. Oikawa, R. Rajkumar, "Scalability in a real-time kernel," rtcsa, pp.35, Fourth International Workshop on Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'97), 1997