K42/Tornado Operating System

Overview K42 is a research operating system currently being developed to address performance and scalability issues of system software on large-scale, shared-memory, NUMA multiprocessor computers. The operating system is a product of research at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the K42 group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. K42 uses a micro-kernel architecture rather than the traditional monolithic kernel design. K42 consists of a small exception-handling component that serves as the micro-kernel, a fast IPC mechanism, and servers for all other components of the operating system. These servers exist in separate address spaces and rely upon the fast IPC mechanism for communication with the micro-kernel and other servers.