Organization scheme of system servers in microkernel-based operating systems - multi-process and multi-thread methods -

We compare organization schemes of out-of-kernel functions in the microkernel-based operating systems, from the viewpoints of concurrent or parallel executions of the functions. We describe two methods; multi-process method and multi-thread one. With the multi-process method, the functions are partitioned into some modules to be allocated to processes. With the multi-thread one, the functions are allocated to a single process including multiple threads. We implement system servers according to the methods on uni-processor environment. Performance evaluation shows that the multi-process method gives good performance.