Dynamic service reconfiguration and migration in the Kea kernel
Alistair Veitch and Norman C. Hutchinson
Abstract:
Kea is a new operating system developed for experimentation with
kernel structuring, configuration and specialization. There are
several features of Kea's design that make the investigation of these
issues practical. Firstly it supports fine-grain decomposition of
kernel services, the components of which communicate using
inter-domain calls. This communication mechanism forms the backbone of
Kea s reconfigurability, as services can be located in separate
domains, for development or debugging purposes, and then dynamically
migrated into a common domain, or into the kernel itself,
transparently to the users of the service. The inter-domain calls are
automatically optimized to procedure calls as appropriate. The service
hierarchy can also be dynamically reconfigured through replacement, or
the layering of new services, either on a system wide or application
specific basis. We describe these features, and discuss the results
from several experiments that demonstrate the practicality and
performance advantages of Kea's design.
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Last modified: Tue Jul 10 21:36:53 PDT 2001 by Alistair Veitch (aveitch@hpl.hp.com)