Hi, I am a beginner to L4, and very interested in it. I think it is great in terms of its minimality and security. However, I have some questions about it, (1) How is its performance compared to other monolithic kernel, say, Linux. Could it make use of multicore, multiprocessor to enjoy the performance scalability? (2) How is its ecosystem, fox example, how to support new hardware, does it need write the driver from scratch or could it make use of Linux driver? And how to write application on it, or, could it run Linux application without modification? (3) How is its virtualization support, could it run Linux vm, and does it need any modification to the guest os?
Cheers, Qing Wei
On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 7:31 AM, Qing Wei wq_idol@163.com wrote:
Hi, I am a beginner to L4, and very interested in it. I think it is great in terms of its minimality and security. However, I have some questions about it, (1) How is its performance compared to other monolithic kernel, say, Linux. Could it make use of multicore, multiprocessor to enjoy the performance scalability?
The performance of Fiasco kernel is not bad, and it should be better than Linux. Fiasco kernel can support multicore very well, while it has deadlock issue.
(2) How is its ecosystem, fox example, how to support new hardware, does it need write the driver from scratch or could it make use of Linux driver? And how to write application on it, or, could it run Linux application without modification? (3) How is its virtualization support, could it run Linux vm, and does it need any modification to the guest os?
The L4Linux is an example of virtualization, and this is a great work. I think it needs to modify the guest Linux.
Cheers, Qing Wei _______________________________________________ l4-hackers mailing list l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/mailman/listinfo/l4-hackers
On Thu Jul 16, 2015 at 11:33:24 -0400, Yuxin Ren wrote:
On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 7:31 AM, Qing Wei wq_idol@163.com wrote:
Hi, I am a beginner to L4, and very interested in it. I think it is great in terms of its minimality and security. However, I have some questions about it, (1) How is its performance compared to other monolithic kernel, say, Linux. Could it make use of multicore, multiprocessor to enjoy the performance scalability?
The performance of Fiasco kernel is not bad, and it should be better than Linux.
Fiasco kernel can support multicore very well, while it has deadlock issue.
Could you elaborate on the deadlock?
Adam
On Thu Jul 16, 2015 at 19:31:42 +0800, Qing Wei wrote:
I am a beginner to L4, and very interested in it. I think it is great in terms of its minimality and security. However, I have some questions about it, (1) How is its performance compared to other monolithic kernel, say, Linux. Could it make use of multicore, multiprocessor to enjoy the performance scalability?
L4Re supports SMP just fine. The system is actually less, so it less in the way of applications and thus leaves them more of the bare metal.
(2) How is its ecosystem, fox example, how to support new hardware, does it need write the driver from scratch or could it make use of Linux driver?
Regarding new devices/hardare and drivers the full scale of approaches is possible. Writing drivers yourself, what you might want to do for certain use cases such as driver size, trustworthiness, licensing, fun, requirements etc. However, reusing some existing drivers is more popular. Again, several approaches possible, but using some virtualization tech for running drivers is the most obvious one.
And how to write application on it, or, could it run Linux application without modification?
L4Re has POSIX (subset) support, so POSIX programs can work without or small modifications, e.g. see http://svn.tudos.org/repos/oc/tudos/trunk/l4/pkg/examples/misc/cat/cat.c But L4Re is not Linux, so Linux-specific programs will not work by just recompiling.
(3) How is its virtualization support, could it run Linux vm, and does it need any modification to the guest os?
We do both hardware-assisted full virtualization and para-virtualization. L4Linux is popular for the para-virtualization approach and it is adapted to run as an application on the system.
Adam
l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de