An Enhanced Multi-Pager Environment Support for Second Generation Microkernels

Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to present a mechanism of enhanced paging support for the second generation microkernels in the form of explicit support of multi-pager environment for the tasks running in the system. Proposed mechanism is based on the intra-kernel high granularity pagers assignments per virtual address space, which allow efficient and simple dispatching of page faults to the appropriate pagers. The paging is one of the major features of the virtual memory, which is extensively used by advanced operating systems to provide an illusion of elastic memory. Original and present second generation microkernels provide only limited, inflexible and unnatural support for paging. Furthermore, facilities provided by current solutions for multi-pager support on the runtime level introduce an overhead in terms of mode switches and thread context switches which can be significantly reduced. Limited paging support limits the attractiveness of the second generation microkernel based systems use in real-life applications, in which processes usually have concurrent servicing of multiple paging servers. The purpose of this paper is to present a facilities for the efficient and flexible support of multi-pager environments for the second generation microkernels. A comparison of the proposed solution to the present architecture L4 + L4Re has been made and overhead of the page fault handling critical path has been evaluated. Proposed solution is simple enough and provides a natural and flexible support of multi-pager environments for second generation microkernels in efficient way. It introduces a third less overhead in terms of the mode switches and thread context switches in comparison to the present L4 + L4Re solution implemented in the Fiasco.OC.