L4Linux performance vs hardware virtualization

[Adam Lackorzynski]

On Wed Feb 07, 2018 at 08:02:15 +0000, Bob Liu wrote:
> L4Linux.org mentioned:
>  "Compared to monolithic Linux, there is a small performance tradeoff because of the µ-kernel architecture. However, the initial L4Linux has been somewhat optimized, and on L4/x86 it has a very acceptable slowdown of less than 4 % for any relevant load.
> "
> Any place can find more detail about the test?
> 
> And I'm very curious the L4Linux performance vs "using hardware virtualization on top of L4", have you made any comparison  before?

To add what Vasily already said, L4Linux has a decent performance but
cannot cope with what hardware features can achieve, esp. for the memory
and CPU virtualization. For I/O there isn't really an architectural
difference, except again if there's hardware support, such as interrupt
injection. For L4Linux there's the (famous) paper from 1997 describing
it in its first variant:
https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/papers_ps/sosp97.pdf



Adam