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K42/Tornado Operating System |
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K42 is a research operating system currently being developed to address
performance and scalability issues of system software on large-scale,
shared-memory, NUMA multiprocessor computers. The operating system is a
product of research at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the
K42 group at the IBM Thomas
J. Watson Research Center.
K42 uses a micro-kernel architecture rather than the traditional monolithic
kernel design. K42 consists of a small exception-handling component that
serves as the micro-kernel, a fast IPC mechanism, and servers for all other
components of the operating system. These servers exist in separate address
spaces and rely upon the fast IPC mechanism for communication with the
micro-kernel and other servers.
History
The core of K42 is based on the University of Toronto's Tornado Operating
System. K42 is the university's third generation of research on scalable
operating systems. Tornado OS / NUMAchine Multiprocessor was the second
generation and Hurricane OS / Hector Multiprocessor was the first
generation. The origin of the name "K42" is
best explained by Bob Wisniewski.
Implementation
K42 runs on 64-bit processors that include the 64-bit PowerPC, MIPS, and AMD
x86-64 processors. In terms of complete systems, K42 runs on SimOS machine
simulation software (under 64-bit PowerPC and MIPS emulation), the NUMAchine
multiprocessor (MIPS), and IBM RS/6000 64-bit PowerPC computers.
Older overview of Tornado OS.
Research Focus
The main research focus at the University of Toronto is on scalability.
Faculty
Professor Michael Stumm
Students
Ph.D.:
Masters:
Former Students
- Adrian Tam - Read Copy
Update (RCU) and Read Block Update (RBU).
- Jonathan Appavoo -
Clustered objects.
- Derek Devries - File system scalability.
- Ben Gamsa - SOMA
Networks; Tornado core kernel scalability.
- Robert Ho - NUMA page
placement policies.
- Kevin Hui - Dynamic clustered
object switching mechanisms.
- Orran Krieger - IBM
Research; Hurricane File System.
- Eric Parsons - Multiprocessor scheduling.
- Karen Reid - University
of Toronto; I/O subsystems.
- Daniel Wilks - Hierarchical application-oriented physical memory
management.
The K42/Tornado Operating System is closely tied with the
K42 project at the IBM Thomas J.
Watson Research Center.
- Enabling Autonomic System Software With Hot-Swapping, IBM Systems Journal
(to appear).
- An
Infrastructure for Multiprocessor Run Time Adaptation, Jonathan Appavoo,
Kevin Hui, Michael Stumm, Robert Wisniewski, Dilma da Silva, Orran Krieger,
Craig Soules, Workshop on Self-Healing Systems (WOSS), 2002.
- Read-Copy Update, Paul
E. McKenney, Jonathan Appavoo, Andi Kleen, Orran Krieger, Rusty Russell,
Dipankar Sarma, and Maneesh Soni, Ottawa Linux Symposium 2001.
- Tornado: Maximizing Locality and
Concurrency in a Shared Memory Multiprocessor Operating System, Ben
Gamsa, Orran Krieger, Jonathan Appavoo, Michael Stumm, USENIX OSDI 1999.
- Customization Lite, Marc
Auslander, Hubertus Franke, Ben Gamsa, Orran Krieger, Michael Stumm, 6th
Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VI), May 1997.
- Exploiting Mapped Files for Parallel
I/O, Orran Krieger, Karen Reid, Michael Stumm, SPDP Workshop on
Modeling and Specification of I/O (MSIO), October 1995.
- (De-)Clustering Objects for
Multiprocessor System Software, Eric Parsons, Ben Gamsa, Orran Krieger,
Michael Stumm, Fourth International Workshop on Object Orientation in
Operating Systems 1995.
All other papers are available from here
and from the IBM K42 web
site.
- QDo: A Quiescent State Callback Facility,
Adrian Tam, MA.Sc. thesis, 2006.
- Clustered Objects, Jonathan Appavoo,
Ph.D. thesis, 2005.
- Performance Analysis and Optimization
of the Hurricane File System on the K42 Operating System, David Tam,
M.A.Sc. thesis, 2003.
- Design and Implementation of K42's
Dynamic Clustered Object Switching Mechanism, Kevin Hui, M.Sc. thesis,
2000.
- Tornado: Maximizing Locality and
Concurrency in a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Operating System, Ben
Gamsa, Ph.D. thesis, 1999.
- Clustered Objects: Initial Design,
Implementaion and Evaluation, Jonathan Appavoo, M.Sc. thesis, 1998.
- HFS: A Flexible File System for
Shared-Memory Multiprocessors, Orran Krieger, Ph.D. thesis, 1994.
- Implementing resource containers in K42, winter/spring 2003.
- Outline of the March 19, 2004
presentation to LBL and ORNL.
Linux Kernel Sources + K42 Patches:
- k42linux026.tar.gz
- This is an image of our working installation, minus .o files. It's a Linux 2.6 source tree with K42 patches already applied to it (patch26b).
Linux patches for the K42 target architecture:
K42 image files:
Toolchain used to build K42:
Debian Linux x86 packages:
Please forward any comments, suggestions or questions
to:
David Tam -- tamda@eecg.toronto.edu
Last modified: Wed Oct 4 17:52:46 EDT 2006
