Linked by Steffen Liebergeld on Thu 13th Jul 2006 17:26 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes DROPS is the educational operating system of the Dresden University of Technology, Germany (TU-Dresden). Its name is an acronym for Dresden Real-Time Operating System, which reveals its strongest feature, it is real-time capable and it is designed with security in mind. Its homepage can be found here. Note: This is the 4th entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!
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This is interesting...
by Tuishimi on Fri 14th Jul 2006 03:01 UTC
Tuishimi
Member since:
2005-07-06

...So, are the goals mostly security-related? Is the performance really any better than the standard Linux kernel?

Would this be useful in virtualization?

RE: This is interesting...
by steffen on Fri 14th Jul 2006 10:29 in reply to "This is interesting..."
steffen Member since:
2005-08-26

The performance is slightly worse than plain Linux because of the overhead of more context switches.

In fact, we published a paper about the performance of microkernels, by comparing L4linux on Fiasco, plain Linux and Linux on Mach. The conclusion is that the overhead "can be kept somewhere between 5% and 10% for applications". You may read the paper here:
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/pubs/sosp97/
"Performance of µ-Kernel-based Systems"

Virtualization is possible in the sense that you may run more than one L4Linux instance on top of the L4 microkernel. You should make sure that those instances use distinct drivers for hardware, to avoid collisions;-).

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[2]: This is interesting...
by Tuishimi on Fri 14th Jul 2006 16:31 in reply to "RE: This is interesting..."
Tuishimi Member since:
2005-07-06

Cool! Thanks!

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1