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'''[[An active and asymmetric kernel]]'''
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'''An active and asymmetric kernel'''
  
 
An active kernel is an evolution of the vertical kernel model and whose proposal is to have CPUs or cores perform kernel activities only. Being an active agent, it is possible that the kernel communicates with the hardware and the user space using alternative mechanisms which are less expensive than the current ones (hardware and software interruptions). Our research focuses on the study of the possibilities offered by these concepts regarding the treatment of the input/output of the network. However, possible applications in other domains have been identified (virtualization, real time, etc).
 
An active kernel is an evolution of the vertical kernel model and whose proposal is to have CPUs or cores perform kernel activities only. Being an active agent, it is possible that the kernel communicates with the hardware and the user space using alternative mechanisms which are less expensive than the current ones (hardware and software interruptions). Our research focuses on the study of the possibilities offered by these concepts regarding the treatment of the input/output of the network. However, possible applications in other domains have been identified (virtualization, real time, etc).

Revisión de 19:55 18 jun 2007

Research in Operating Systems

The fast evolution of hardware technologies, data networks and design of user software contrasts with the fact that the design of the kernel and the mechanisms which implement the protection and virtualization of the resources, in the current operating systems, has not experienced significant progress in the last three decades. This disparity is most evident in a significant processing overhead, known as operating system intrusion.

This research line focuses on identifying, proposing and evaluating new characteristics related to the performance and scalability of the Linux kernel, taking into account the new challenges presented by multicore architectures and network centric computing to next generation's operating systems.


An active and asymmetric kernel

An active kernel is an evolution of the vertical kernel model and whose proposal is to have CPUs or cores perform kernel activities only. Being an active agent, it is possible that the kernel communicates with the hardware and the user space using alternative mechanisms which are less expensive than the current ones (hardware and software interruptions). Our research focuses on the study of the possibilities offered by these concepts regarding the treatment of the input/output of the network. However, possible applications in other domains have been identified (virtualization, real time, etc).


Asynchronous system calls based on shared memory

The semantics of the passage of parameters can have a significant impact in the efficiency of the data transference between the kernel and the applications. The line of work focuses on alternative possibilities intended to increase the efficiency of the Linux kernel in the treatment of the input/output, mainly in relation to the possibility of performing vectorized operations (which favours scatter-gather operations) and using shared memory between the kernel and the user space, to avoid physical copies in the memory from one protection domain to the other. To achieve greater scalability, avoiding the overhead implied by the scheduling of great amounts of threads, we are evaluating APIs which have asynchronous input/output semantics for socket and file operations.


New virtualization techniques

Recently, two new techniques of virtualization have achieved an outstanding level of performance in comparison with the performance of the native execution. Paravirtualization and hardware assisted virtualization, separately or combined (cooperative virtualization), place themselves as a new layer of standard abstraction which will revolutionize the structure of computing centers thanks to the consolidation of hardware, a higher level of security and redundancy, the reduction in the power consumption, the migration of virtual hosts without interrupting the services, etc. This line of research focuses on comparing the alternative techniques, evaluating the integration of this functionality in the kernel and detecting the options offered by multicore architectures to these technologies.

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