The
NetBSD
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...
rump kernel is the first implementation of the "anykernel" concept where
drivers either can be compiled into or run in the monolithic kernel or in user space on top of a light-weight kernel.
The NetBSD drivers can be used on top of the rump kernel on a wide range of
POSIX
The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...
operating systems, such as the
Hurd
GNU Hurd is a collection of microkernel servers written as part of GNU, for the GNU Mach microkernel. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation, designed as a replacement for the Unix kernel, and ...
,
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
,
NetBSD
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...
,
DragonFly BSD
DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in ...
,
Solaris kernels and even
Cygwin, along with the file system utilities built with the rump libraries. The rump kernels can also run without POSIX directly on top of the
Xen hypervisor, an
L4 microkernel using the
Genode OS Framework or even on OS-less
bare metal
In information technology, bare machine (or bare-metal computer) is a computer which has no operating system. The software executed by a bare machine, commonly called a "bare metal program" or "bare metal application", is designed to interact dir ...
.
Anykernel
An anykernel is different in concept from
microkernel
In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...
s,
exokernels,
partitioned kernels or
hybrid kernel
A hybrid kernel is an operating system Kernel (operating system), kernel whose architecture attempts to combine aspects and benefits of microkernel and monolithic kernel architectures used in operating systems.
Overview
The traditional kernel cat ...
s in that it tries to preserve the advantages of a
monolithic kernel
A monolithic kernel is an operating system software architecture, architecture with the entire operating system running in kernel space. The monolithic model differs from other architectures such as the microkernel in that it alone defines a high ...
, while still enabling the faster driver development and added security in user space. The "anykernel" concept refers to an architecture-agnostic approach to drivers where drivers can either be compiled into the monolithic kernel or be run as a userspace process, microkernel-style, without code changes. With drivers, a wider concept is considered where not only
device driver
In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...
s are included but also
file systems and the
networking stack.
File System Access Utilities
The File System Access Utilities (fs-utils) is a subproject built with the rump libraries. It aims to have a set of utilities to access and modify a file system image without having to mount it. The fs-utils does not require a superuser account to access the image or device. The advantage of fs-utils over similar projects such as
mtools is supporting the usage of familiar
filesystem Unix commands (
ls,
cp,
mv,
cd, etc.) for a large number of file systems which are supported by
NetBSD
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...
.
See also
*
Filesystem in Userspace
*
Unikernel
References
External links
*
''Rump Kernels: No OS? No Problem!''by Antti Kantee and Justin Cormack (PDF)
DDEKit
{{Operating system
NetBSD
Operating system kernels