Article

Correct, fast, maintainable - choose any three!

Authors:

Bernard Blackham,

Gernot HeiserAuthors Info & Claims

APSys '12: Proceedings of the Third ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific conference on Systems

Page 13

Published: 23 July 2012 Publication History

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Abstract

The common-case IPC handler in microkernels, referred to as the fastpath, is performance-critical and thus is often optimised using hand-written assembly. However, compiler technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, which suggests that we should re-evaluate this approach.

We present a case study of optimising the IPC fast-path in the seL4 microkernel. This fastpath is written in C and relies on an optimising C compiler for good performance. We present our techniques in modifying the C sources to assist with compiler optimisation. We compare our results with a hand-optimised assembly implementation, which gains no extra benefit from hand-tuning.

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Cited By

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Jacobsen CKhole MSpall SBauer SBurtsev A(2016)Lightweight Capability DomainsACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/2883591.288360149:2(44-50)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2883591.2883601
Jacobsen CKhole MSpall SBauer SBurtsev ALu S(2015)Lightweight capability domainsProceedings of the 8th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2818302.2818307(8-14)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818302.2818307
Klein GAndronick JElphinstone KMurray TSewell TKolanski RHeiser G(2014)Comprehensive formal verification of an OS microkernelACM Transactions on Computer Systems10.1145/256053732:1(1-70)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2560537
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Information

Published In

APSys '12: Proceedings of the Third ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific conference on Systems

July 2012

16 pages

General Chair:
Sue Moon
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea

In-Cooperation

SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems
USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

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USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 23 July 2012

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Overall Acceptance Rate 169 of 430 submissions, 39%

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Jacobsen CKhole MSpall SBauer SBurtsev A(2016)Lightweight Capability DomainsACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/2883591.288360149:2(44-50)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2883591.2883601
Jacobsen CKhole MSpall SBauer SBurtsev ALu S(2015)Lightweight capability domainsProceedings of the 8th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2818302.2818307(8-14)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818302.2818307
Klein GAndronick JElphinstone KMurray TSewell TKolanski RHeiser G(2014)Comprehensive formal verification of an OS microkernelACM Transactions on Computer Systems10.1145/256053732:1(1-70)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2560537
Shi YBlackham BHeiser G(2013)Code optimizations using formally verified propertiesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2544173.250951348:10(427-442)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2544173.2509513
Elphinstone KHeiser GKaminsky MDahlin M(2013)From L3 to seL4 what have we learnt in 20 years of L4 microkernels?Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/2517349.2522720(133-150)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517349.2522720
Shi YBlackham BHeiser GHosking AEugster PLopes C(2013)Code optimizations using formally verified propertiesProceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages & applications10.1145/2509136.2509513(427-442)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2509136.2509513

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