An Australian think tank has spun out an embedded and real-time operating systems company headquartered in Chicago. The spin-out — “Open Kernel Labs” (OK Labs) — is shipping a commercially supported, BSD-licensed “OKL4” microkernel that runs Linux and other guest OSes in user space, targeting devices such as mobile phones.

OK touts OKL4 as the best-performing available microkernel. OKL4 provides a native programming environment for real-time executives, alongside a minimal hardware abstraction layer (HAL) said to support various operating system “personalities” in secure user-space partitions, with interprocess communication handled via shared memory and shared devices. One supported guest OS is a “Wombat” Linux implementation based on a 2.6.10 kernel.

OK says it plans to ship a provably bug-free version of OKL4 by 2008, presumably targeting military, aerospace, medical, and aeronautics applications, and the like.

OK Labs spun out from NICTA (National Information/Communication Technology, Australia), an Australian government-sponsored think tank that previously supplied L4 to phone chip giant Qualcomm (story). Qualcomm used the NICTA L4 implementation to run an “Iguana” Linux stack alongside BREW in a phone reference design based on its MSM6550 mobile phone processor.

The OKL4 microkernel

OKL4 comprises an “extremely small,” BSD-licensed microkernel designed to provide “minimality with respect to security.” That is, by including only services impossible or impractical to implement outside the kernel, OKL4 aims to provide the smallest possible “trusted security base.” Security-critical subsystems such as crypto services can be implemented to depend on fewer than 20,000 lines of system code, for instance — reducing the number of nooks and crannies for bugs to hide in.

In addition to minimalistic execution environments for performance- and security-critical applications, OKL4 provides a minimal hardware abstraction layer supporting various operating system “personalities,” each running in separate user space partitions. These partitions provide license segregation, as well as protection from software faults, OK Labs said. An additional “side-effect” might be guest OS portability, since memory management hardware and other architecture-dependent mechanisms are virtualized.

OKL4's “fine-grained, light-weight protection domains” are said to encapsulate application programs, system services, device drivers, and library modules, in order to improve overall system robustness. Meanwhile, cross-domain communication and “controlled sharing of memory” allow high-bandwidth, low-latency subsystem communications and efficient sharing of devices. The approach “enables the use of lightweight components with hardware-enforced interfaces — the key to managing growing software complexity,” OK suggests.

FancyPants with multiple floating still and video layers (Click to enlarge)

Lightweight graphics stack

A lightweight graphics stack for native OKL4 applications and OKL4 guest operating systems is available from Fluffy Spider, which has already announced a joint research, development, and marketing alliance with OK Labs.

Fluffy Spider's “FancyPants ” graphics stack has a footprint of about 3MB, yet offers impressive multi-layer graphics capabilities (demo's here) along with advanced features such as soft shadows, screen and image transitions, fades and wipes, 32-bit alpha blending, animations, glitter, color manipulation, scaling, rotation, and 3D folds. It supports L4, Linux, Symbian, and Windows CE.

Fluffy Spider's product development services team hopes to support OKL4 in commercial engagements. Company CEO Robi Karp stated, “We look forward to the ongoing collaborative delivery of products that enable OEMs to offer highly innovative and secure devices.”

Karp is among the featured speakers at this week's CELF Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Availability

OKL4 is currently — and will continue to be — available as source code under a BSD license. Also available are BSD-licensed related technologies, including “a sophisticated build system; cross-compilation tools for a number of popular architectures; sample projects and configurations for a number of popular platforms for getting started; and, additional tools designed specifically for getting the optimum use of OKL4,” OK Labs said.

Additionally, an available commercial edition of OLK4 includes “a customer service and customer support package that provides OKL4 customization; processor architecture porting; and, support and training for OKL4 and related technologies.”

OKL4 currently supports ARM v4/v5 and x86 processors, with support for MIPS in the wings. Currently supported guest OSes include Wombat, described as a “high-performance virtualized Linux” based on a 2.6.10 kernel, and eCos, an open-source RTOS (real-time operating system).

In a statement, OK Labs said it has already delivered development and support services to “major manufacturers of wireless devices and chipsets.” Co-founder and CEO Steve Subar commented, “OK has a unique advantage of being a start-up company with a proven product in hand. We are actively involved with world-leading OEMs [and] expect to announce these relationships within the year.”

Headquartered in Chicago, OK Labs will maintain R&D facilities in Australia, under the leadership of CTO and co-founder Gernot Heiser. A professor of operating systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Dr. Heiser also leads NICTA's ERTOS (embedded and real-time OS) research program.

 
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