16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ’97), October 5–8, 1997, Saint-Malo, France The Performance of µ-Kernel-Based Systems

First-generation µ-kernels have a reputation for being too slow and lacking sufficient flexibility. To determine whether L4, a lean second-generation µ-kernel, has overcome these limitations, we have repeated several earlier experiments and conducted some novel ones. Moreover, we ported the Linux operating system to run on top of the L4 µ-kernel and compared the resulting system with both Linux running native, and MkLinux, a Linux version that executes on top of a firstgeneration Mach-derived µ-kernel. For L 4 Linux, the AIM benchmarks report a maximum throughput which is only 5 % lower than that of native Linux. The corresponding penalty is 5 times higher for a co-located in-kernel version of MkLinux, and 7 times higher for a userlevel version of MkLinux. These numbers demonstrate both that it is possible to implement a high-performance conventional operating system personality above a µ-kernel, and that the performance of the µ-kernel is crucial to achieve this. Further experiments illustrate that the resulting system is highly extensible and that the extensions perform well. Even real-time memory management including second-level cache allocation can be implemented at user-level, coexisting with L 4 Linux