The L4 µ-Kernel Family

Projects and applications

• Current and ongoing projects
• Past projects

Current and ongoing projects

DROPS - The Dresden Real-Time Operating system (TU Dresden)

The Dresden Real-Time Operating Systems Project is a research project aiming at the support of applications with Quality of Service requirements. It is based on L4/x86 and Fiasco.

This project has a lot of subprojects, including real-time disk, networking, and GUI components, a complete set of development libraries, and an emulation environment for Linux device drivers. For more information, please see the DROPS software projects page.

L⁴Linux (TU Dresden, Uni Karlsruhe)

L⁴Linux is a port of the Linux kernel to L4/x86, Fiasco, and (in the future) L4/MIPS. It is a server running on top of the µ-kernel in user mode, including all device drivers. L⁴Linux is binary compatible to existing Linux distributions.

Mungi (UNSW)

Mungi is a single-address-space operating system (SASOS) based on L4/MIPS and L4/Alpha.

Perseus (Uni Saarbrücken)

Perseus is a security kernel for a system architecture suitable to perform security-critical tasks like e-commerce or home banking. Its trusted computing base provides basic security services needed to securely generate meaningful digital signatures and to protect critical applications against malicious code like viruses and Trojan horses. The overall design is clear and flexible enough to be formally verified and evaluated according to the Common Criteria or ITSEC.

PLEB Project (UNSW)

The PLEB project's goal is to producing a flexible, low-power system for use in portable and embedded applications which is capable of a high level of processing power. It uses a StrongARM CPU, and Gauntlet (an L4 implementation for StrongARM) will be its operating system.

Teaching Advanced Operating Systems (UNSW)

UNSW is offering an advanced operating systems course where students write their own operating system on top of L4.

LEO/P4 - Microkernel-based OSEK (Sysgo AG)

OSEK is an operating-system interface for applications running on electronic devices in cars. LEO/P4 is an implementation of OSEK on top of the P4 microkernel. Together with the OSEK emulation environments LEO/Lynx and LEO/Linux, it provides an OSEK run-time environment that can seamlessly support OSEK applications from the early stages of development unto the final production version in a vehicle. (LEO/P4 whitepaper)

µSINA - Secure microkernel-based system architecture (TU Dresden)

The goal of µSINA is to replace SINA Linux (an IPSec gateway based on a downscaled, hardened Linux system) with a (compared to the monolithic operating system) significantly smaller and therefore better evaluable system platform.

COMQUAD - Components with quantitative properties and adaptivity (TU Dresden, Uni München, Uni Erlangen)

The project aims at a system architecture and a matching design methodology that support the composition of adaptive software from components with consideration of guaranteed non-functional properties, such as throughput and response time, or at higher levels of abstraction, frame rate, frame quality, transactions per second, number of active clients.

L4Hurd

The goal of this project is a working implementation of the GNU/Hurd on the L4 microkernel.

IoL4

IoL4 is a small OS containing the Io programing language on top of the L4 microkernel.

Past projects

SawMill Linux Project (IBM Research, Watson; Uni Karlsruhe)

SawMill Linux aims at building a configurable multi-server Unix system based on Linux and L4/x86.

See also: SawMill homepage at Uni Karlsruhe

Lava Hitserver (IBM Research, Watson)

An architecture for building high-performance server systems that can efficiently serve large local clusters of NCs or other clients. The key component in this architecture is a generic cache module that is designed to fully utilize available bus bandwidth. Experiments show that such a server system can achieve throughput rates of up to 36,000 transactions per second.