The T4 microkernel. Microkernel for distributed operating system.

At the beginning of the 90s there was no commercial operating system satisfying requirements imposed on a distributed operating system. Some experimental distributed operating systems built upon microkernels existed in the research area but microkernels were either too dependent on the resulting operating system (UNIX) or were too bound to distribution of an operating system (RPC in a microkernel). Therefore, we approached in 1994 to the design and to the implementation of the T4 microkernel and a distributed operating system built upon it. Carefully designing the microkernel interface we have gained a pure local microkernel with no notion about well-known operating systems and without any direct support for a distributed operating system. We are able to achieve important features of distributed operating systems (including a process migration) by implementation of system processes running in a user mode of the processor. Likewise, the support for an emulation of known operating systems (e.g. Linux) can be easily attained. The T4 is a microkernel suitable for building fast local operating systems or wide area distributed systems.Available from STL Prague, CZ / NTK - National Technical LibrarySIGLECZCzech Republi