BrickOS: specialized kernels for heterogeneous hardware resources

Abstract

The emerging field of human-machine-material integration requires new operating system kernels to support the ubiquitous computing, so as to manage and control massive heterogeneous hardware and serve dynamic and changeable application scenarios. This paper proposes a configurable specialized kernel architecture, named BrickOS, which can flexibly select the system components of the kernel according to the usage scenario. Developers can choose to run the system components in user mode to provide better security, or run in a shared-address-space kernel mode to improve performance. In order to ensure the security of system components running in the same address space, BrickOS provides a unified abstraction for the memory protection mechanism of the underlying hardware used for memory isolation in a single address space. The test results show that BrickOS can generate customized kernels that meet the requirements for different scenarios, with low inter-process call (IPC) overhead and good overall performance.