Hello!

[Blaine Garst]

Greetings, all!

I am beginning to explore nano/micro-kernel issues again after a long hiatus (24 years).  I don’t know how active this list is nor its followers, so I will be brief.

At the moment I am discussing kernel vs user scheduling speed bumps in the now prevalent multi-core cpu architectures in the context of the ISO C11 subcommittee CPLEX which is considering adding parallelization language extensions.  I have already demonstrated feature equivalence using closures (Apple’s Blocks, which I introduced and have previously proposed for C11) and some new synchronization and scheduling primitives that I am already using as part of some Actor research.

I am looking for a non-GPL kernel/executive/nano-kernel to redo some nano-kernel work I did as part of a joint Bell Labs-Sun collaboration that gave rise to SVR4 and, in opposition, the Open Software Foundation.  Essentially I built a capability based nano-kernel somewhat along the lines of the V Kernel of David Cheriton (the Sun folks did “Spring”)   My prototype at the time had IPC transfer speed of 10x vtable dispatch cost.  At the time I wrote my own IDL, but after joining NeXT we added such a concept as a first class language feature, and it was copied into Java as “interfaces”.  This is still an active interest of mine also in the context of Actors.

Is this an appropriate list to discuss whether L4 is an appropriate starting point and such issues that might arise from my exploration?  (My friends and former colleagues at Apple have IP restrictions such that I would prefer to not risk even the appearance of possible improprieties in discussing such matters)

Blaine Garst