Trustworthy Systems

Correct, fast, maintainable — choose any three!

Authors

Bernard Blackham and Gernot Heiser

NICTA\ UNSW

Abstract

The common-case IPC handler in microkernels, referred to as the fastpath, is performance-critical and thus is often optimised using hand-written assembly. However, compiler technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, which suggests that we should reevaluate this approach.

We present a case-study in the optimisation of the IPC fastpath in the seL4 microkernel. This fastpath is written in C and relies on an optimising C compiler for good performance. We present our techniques in modifying the C sources to assist with compiler optimisation. We compare our results with a hand-optimised assembly implementation, which gains no extra benefit from hand-tuning.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Blackham_Heiser_12,
    address          = {Seoul, Korea},
    author           = {Blackham, Bernard and Heiser, Gernot},
    booktitle        = {Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys)},
    doi              = {10.1145/2349896.2349909},
    keywords         = {optimization, microkernels, verification, trustworthy systems},
    month            = jul,
    pages            = {7},
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/5858.pdf},
    publisher        = {ACM},
    slides           = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_slides/5858.pdf},
    title            = {Correct, fast, maintainable --- choose any three!},
    year             = {2012}
  }

Download