OK Linux
In the last decade, Linux has progressed from having marginal presence in embedded systems design to leading the segment, with 25% of new 32- and 64-bit designs, building on the open source platform (VDC).
To meet this industry-wide requirement for a ready-to-deploy Linux OS, Open Kernel Labs developed OK Linux, a pre-built and paravirtualized version of the Linux kernel and base libraries, ready to run as a guest OS under OKL4.
OK Linux features include
- Paravirtualized Linux kernel
- Support for ARM, Intel, and other architectures
- Compatibility with standard GNU tools and commercial SDKs
- Linux virtualization in a protected domain, complemented by OKL4s lightweight execution contexts
- High performance IPC ensures the ability to integrate isolated, user-level components into embedded systems to satisfy demanding performance requirements.
OK Linux benefits:
- Time-to-market
- Rapid implementation of Linux guest OS support for OKL4-based virtualization
- Interoperable and easy-to-integrate with a wide range of Linux distributions
- Reliability
- Linux and device drivers run at user level, in isolated domains, limiting privileged code to the OKL4 microkernel for better fault isolation.
- When running in an OKL4 VM, Linux and its applications are isolated from code running in other VMs or lightweight OKL4 execution environments.
- Innovative device-driver approach provides high-performance, sharable, isolated, user-level device drivers for improved reliability and security. Device drivers can run in a guest operating system as well.
Performance
Paravirtualization introduces overhead that can affect the performance of applications running in a virtual machine compared to applications running in the native/hosted machine. Open Kernel Labs has taken steps to minimize this impact. For example, support for Fast Address Space Switching on the ARM architecture resulted in application performance in a Linux VM within a few percent of native performance. Using OKL4 represents a large improvement in trustworthiness for a minimal reduction in guest OS performance.
Linux Guest OS Benchmarks
Open Kernel Labs used the popular ReAIM benchmarks to illustrate how little performance is impacted when the Linux kernel is paravirtualized for OKL4.
The AIM Multiuser Benchmark Suite version 7 measures performance of multiuser computer systems. The use of ReAIM here illustrates that running Linux as a paravirtualized guest OS has extremely small impact on overall performance, independent of load.
| ReAIM Benchmark | Linux Native | Linux on OKL4 | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Task | 45.2 | 43.6 | 0.96 |
| 2 Task | 23.6 | 22.6 | 0.95 |
| 3 Task | 15.8 | 15.3 | 0.96 |
Download and learn more about ReAIM at http://sourceforge.net/projects/re-aim-7.
Get
|
|