Antti and others, Last we used this list, we were asking about TLS to port rump kernels (RK) to our OS. Months have passed, and I wanted to give a brief update.
We finished our port of the BMK code to our system (a microkernel called Composite). We also wrote a virtual NIC that uses our communication channels to communicate between RKs, enabling a Xen-like Dom0 RK to handle networking (and routing) for multiple RK instances. Each of these RK instances is quite like a Xen DomU VM, so this can be seen as a RK-centric version of virtualization. We did all of this to demonstrate a scheduling technology that is likely of less interest here. The performance of the system is roughly on-par with Xen for nginx serving persistent connections even with a pretty brain-dead data-movement mechanism that requires quite a bit of memcpy. So I wanted to write here to show that the RK stuff is being used, and that it is a great enabling technology. Thanks to everyone involved in the technology. We are going to take this infrastructure in a few directions, and I'll keep the list updated. If there is any interest in integrating this stuff into mainline, let us know and we'll see what's possible. Huge kudos to Robert Gifford, Luke Baier, and Phani Kishore Gadepalli for pushing this work through. Best, Gabe Parmer
