Microkernel Construction

Organization

The lecture will start in the first week on 10th April 2025.

During this term, both lecture and exercises will be offered as hybrid events (in person + live stream via BBB). More details about the organization and all future announcements will be made via the Mailing List.

Topics

This lecture focuses on current developments in the area of 2nd generation microkernels. After introducing microkernel-based operating systems in general, it dives into the construction of the microkernel itself by looking at the design of, e.g., interprocess communication, threads, and address spaces. The exercises provide hands-on experience by allowing students to hack on a stripped-down microkernel. Finally, the lecture presents multiple case studies of microkernels used in academia and industry.

We recommend to visit the lecture Microkernel-based Operating Systems first, but this is no requirement. However, we do assume basic knowledge of Linux and programming skills of C/C++ language.

Slides

Slides will be published here shortly before the lectures.

• 10.04. Introduction
• 17.04. Threads and address spaces

• 08.05. Kernel entry/exit

• 15.05. Exercise 1: entry/exit (APB E042) - Solution

• 22.05. Interprocess communication

• 05.06. Exercise 2: ELF/multiboot (APB E042) - Solution

• 26.06. Case study: L4Re

• 03.07. Capabilities

• 10.07. Exercise 3: thread switching (APB E042) - Solution

• 17.07. Case study: M³

• 24.07. Case study: Escape

Additional Documentation

Operating System Basics:

• Modern Operating Systems: Andrew S. Tanenbaum (OS Concepts, OS Structures, Virtual Memory)

Further information about the discussed OSes:

• NOVA: A Microhypervisor-Based Secure Virtualization Architecture
• NOVA git repo
• Fiasco.OC microkernel
• Escape
• M³: A Hardware/Operating-System Co-Design to Tame Heterogeneous Manycores
• M³ git repo