Application specific operating systems (ASOS) have been around for quite
some time, but at a fairly high level of granularity, e.g., in microkernel
architectures you can tailor your OS needs by running various OS functions
as user level processes. However, we are developing application specific
operating system components at a very fine level of granularity. This would
enable the construction of microkernels themselves as well as more specialized
system software for information products including embedded systems and
real-time systems.
One key theme for our work is the notion of reconfigurable HW/OS. Since
the first microkernel appeared, there has been support for Application
Specific Operating Systems . ASOS represent a form of reconfiguration and
many research projects have attempted to refine this concept to provide
lower cost and higher performance. With embedded systems becoming more
prevalent, there is another impetus for reconfigurability. In our work
we are interested in reconfigurability from design time to runtime. We
are also looking into exploiting new hardware features that allow very
dynamic re-initializing of FPGAs (i.e., reconfigurability of HW on-the-fly)
and the impact of such HW on the OS. One specific project we have is the
development of component-based microkernels that are hot swappable. In
particlar, we are looking into ways in which to write OS components that
permit hot swapping.