Antti and others,
Last we used this list, we were asking about TLS to port rump kernels (RK)
to our OS. Months have passed, and I wanted to give a brief update.
We finished our port of the BMK code to our system (a microkernel called
Composite). We also wrote a virtual NIC that uses our communication
channels to communicate between RKs, enabling a Xen-like Dom0 RK to handle
networking (and routing) for multiple RK instances. Each of these RK
instances is quite like a Xen DomU VM, so this can be seen as a RK-centric
version of virtualization.
We did all of this to demonstrate a scheduling technology that is likely of
less interest here. The performance of the system is roughly on-par with
Xen for nginx serving persistent connections even with a pretty brain-dead
data-movement mechanism that requires quite a bit of memcpy.
So I wanted to write here to show that the RK stuff is being used, and that
it is a great enabling technology. Thanks to everyone involved in the
technology. We are going to take this infrastructure in a few directions,
and I'll keep the list updated. If there is any interest in integrating
this stuff into mainline, let us know and we'll see what's possible.
Huge kudos to Robert Gifford, Luke Baier, and Phani Kishore Gadepalli for
pushing this work through.
Best,
Gabe Parmer
