Lynxos

LynxOS
LynxOS 3.0 moves from the monolithic architecture of earlier versions to a microkernel design. The microkernel is 28 kilobytes in size and provides the essential services in scheduling, interrupt dispatch, and synchronization. Other services are provided by kernel lightweight service modules, called Kernel Plug-Ins (KPIs). By adding KPIs to the microkernel, the system can be configured to support I/O and file systems, TCP/IP, streams, sockets, and so on, and functions as a multipurpose UNIX operating system as earlier versions do.

Unlike single-threaded system service providers in traditional microkernel systems, KPIs are multithreaded. Each KPI can create as many threads to execute its routines as needed. LynxOS says that there is no context switch when sending a message (e.g., RFS) to a KPI, and inter-KPI communication takes only a few instructions [Bunn].

LynxOS can be configured as a self-hosted system. In such a system, embedded applications are developed on the same system on which they are to be deployed and run.This means that the operating system must also support tools such as compilers, debuggers, and performance profilers and allow them to run on the same platform as embedded applications. Protecting the operating system and critical applications from these possibly untrustworthy applications is essential. Moreover, their memory demands are large. For this reason, LynxOS not only provides memory protection through hardware Memory Management Units (MMUs) but also offers optional demand paging.

In LynxOS, application threads (and processes) make I/O requests to the I/O system via system calls such as open( ), read( ), write( ), select( ), and close( ) that resemble the corresponding UNIX system calls. Each I/O request is sent directly by the kernel to a device driver for the respective I/O device. LynxOS device drivers follow the split interrupt handling strategy. Each driver contains an interrupt handler and a kernel thread. The former carries out the first step of interrupt handling at an interrupt request priority. The latter is a thread that shares the same address space with the kernel but is separate from the kernel. If the interrupt handler does not complete the processing of an interrupt, it sets an asynchronous system trap to interrupt the kernel. When the kernel can respond to the (software) interrupt (i.e., when the kernel is in a preemptable state), it schedules an instance of the kernel thread at the priority of the thread which opened the interrupting device. When the kernel thread executes, it continues interrupt handling and reenables the interrupt when it completes. LynxOS calls this mechanism priority tracking.