K42 uses a microkernel architecture rather than the traditional monolithic kernel design. K42 consists of a small exception-handling component that serves as the microkernel, a fast inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism named protected procedure call (PPC), and servers for most other components of the operating system. These servers exist in separate address spaces and rely upon the fast IPC mechanism for communication with the microkernel and other servers.
History
The core of K42 is based on the University of Toronto's operating system Tornado.[2] K42 is the university's third generation of research on scalable operating systems. Tornado OS on a nuMachine Multiprocessor[3] was the second generation and Hurricane OS[4] on a Hector Multiprocessor[5] was the first generation.
Another goal of the K42 design is to achieve a customizable and maintainable system. Being built with an object-oriented programming design, it allows applications to customize and thus optimize the OS services required, and then on the fly, hot swap kernel object implementations. This is particularly important for applications, such as databases and web servers, where the ability to control physical resources can improve performance.
