The L4Ka team is happy to announce the first release of the L4Ka::Pistachio microkernel.
L4Ka::Pistachio is the latest L4 microkernel developed by the System Architecture Group at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in collaboration with the DISY group at the University of New South Wales, Australia. It is the first available kernel implementation of the L4 Version 4 kernel API (currently code-named Version X.2), which is fully 32 and 64 bit clean and provides multiprocessor support. A broad overview of L4Ka::Pistachio and the L4 Version 4 API can be found in:
http://l4ka.org/projects/pistachio/pistachio-whitepaper.pdf
L4Ka::Pistachio is built from ground up incorporating the research results of the last seven years of microkernel and multi-server research. The code is written in C++ with a strong focus on performance and portability. The first release includes support for many of today's widely used commodity architectures:
o Intel IA32 (Pentium and higher) o Intel IA64 (Itanium1) o PowerPC 32bit (IBM 750) o Alpha (21164) o MIPS 64bit (R4000, R5000)
The variety of supported architectures makes L4Ka::Pistachio an ideal research and development platform for a wide variety of systems. Additional architectural support for AMD64, ARM, Power4, and UltraSparc is either planned or already in progress.
L4Ka::Pistachio is available under the two-clause BSD license. Source and binary distributions, documentation, and other online resources can be found on the L4Ka website:
Within the next few weeks we are going to release L4Linux 2.4.20 which has support for L4Ka::Pistachio/ia32 (besides the old V2 and X.0 APIs).
Happy hacking,
The L4Ka Development Team