Enhancing a dependable multiserver operating system with temporal protection via resource reservations

Abstract

Nowadays, microkernel-based systems are getting studied and adopted with a renewed interest in a wide number of IT scenarios. Their advantages over classical monolithic solutions mainly concern the dependability domain. By being capable of dynamically detect and solve non-expected behaviours within its core components, a microkernel-based OS would eventually run forever with no need to be restarted. Dependability in this context mainly aims at isolating components from a spatial point of view: a microkernel-based system may definitely not be adopted in the context of real-time environments, simply basing on this kind of protection only. One of the most active real-time research areas concerns adding temporal protection mechanisms to general purpose operating systems. By making use of such mechanisms, these systems become suitable for being adopted in the context of time-sensitive domains. Microkernel-based systems have always been thought of as a kind of platform not suited to real-time contexts, due to the high latencies introduced by the message passing technique as the only inter-process communication (IPC) facility within the system. With computer performances growing at a fairly high rate, this overhead becomes negligible with respect to the typical real-time processing times. In the last years, many algorithms belonging to the class of the so-called Resource Reservations (RRES) have been devised in order to provide the systems with the needed temporal isolation. By introducing a RRES-aware scheduler in the context of a microkernel-based system, we may enrich it with the temporal benefits it needs in order to be deployed within domains with real-time requirements. In this paper we propose a generic way to implement these mechanisms, dependent for a very small part on the underlying OS mechanisms. In order to show the generality of our RRES framework we implemented it in the context of Minix 3, a highly dependable microkernel-based OS with an impressive users base. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.