Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) is a privately owned company that develops microkernel-based hypervisors and operating systems for embedded systems. The company was founded in 2006 by Steve Subar and Gernot Heiser as a spinout from NICTA. It was headquartered in Chicago, while

research and development Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existi ...

was located in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

. The company was acquired by

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded, aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales, and 5th largest in the Uni ...

in September 2012.

Products

OKL4 Microvisor

The OKL4 Microvisor is an open-source software system software platform for embedded systems that can be used as a hypervisor, and as a simple real-time operating system with memory protection. It is a variant of the L4 microkernel. OKL4 is a Type I hypervisor and runs on single- and multi-core processors based on ARM, MIPS, and x86 processors. OKL4 has been deployed on over 2 billion mobile phones, both as a baseband processor operating system and for hosting guest operating systems. Most notable and visible is the company's design win at Motorola for the Evoke QA4 messaging phone, the first phone which employs virtualization to support two concurrent operating systems ( Linux and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW)) on one processor core.

Paravirtualized guest OSes

OK Labs also supplies ready-to-integrate paravirtualized guest application operating systems, including OK:Symbian (

SymbianOS Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian O ...

), OK:Linux ( Linux), OK:Windows ( Windows) and OK:Android (

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

Hardware virtualization

The OKL4 Microvisor supports ARM hardware virtualization extensions, as introduced in the Cortex-A15 processor. The use of hardware virtualization greatly reduces the changes required to a guest OS.

Background

OK Labs and OKL4 are the result of collaboration among academia, business, and open-source development. OK Labs technology is derived from the L4 microkernel which originated in the early 1990s at German research Lab GMD, further developed at

IBM Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, Yorktown Heights, New York (state), New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north ...

, the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, the University of New South Wales and NICTA in Australia. As commercial ventures, OK Labs and OKL4 were launched by NICTA in 2006, with further investment by Citrix and other venture partners. OK Labs technology continues to benefit from ties to academia and research projects, to NICTA, and to the global open-source community.

Acquisition

The company was acquired by

in September 2012 and has since closed its Sydney office. In February 2014, Cog Systems was founded by former Open Kernel Labs staff and continued OKL4 development in Sydney. In April 2019, Cog Systems went into liquidation and closed.

References

External links

*
Open Kernel Labs homepage

Open Kernel Labs Community Wiki

NICTA home page

Cog Systems home page
* {{Microkernel Virtualization software Mobile computers Software companies based in Illinois Software companies of the United States