BrickOS: specialized kernels for heterogeneous hardware resources
Jinyu Gu, Hao Li, Yubin Xia, Haibing Guan, Zuohua Ding, Yongwang Zhao, Haibo Chen · Scientia Sinica Informationis · 2024
The emerging field of human-machine-material integration requires new operating system kernels to support the ubiquitous computing, so as to manage and control massive heterogeneous hardware and serve dynamic and changeable application scenarios.This paper proposes a configurable specialized kernel architecture, named BrickOS which can flexibly select the system components of the kernel according to the usage scenario.Developers can choose to run the system components in user mode to provide better security, or run in a shared-address-space kernel mode to improve performance.In order to ensure the security of system components running in the same address space, BrickOSprovides a unified abstraction for the memory protection mechanism of the underlying hardware used for memory isolation in a single address space.The test results show that BrickOScan generate customized kernels that meet the requirements for different scenarios, with low inter-process call (IPC) overhead and good overall performance.