Technical Overview
HelenOS is based on a preemptible microkernel called SPARTAN. The microkernel handles multitasking, memory management and inter-process communication. It also provides kernel-based threads and supports symmetric multiprocessing.
Each process (called task) can contain several threads (preemptively scheduled by the kernel) which, in turn, can contain several fibers scheduled cooperatively in user space. Device and file-system drivers, as well as other system services, are implemented by a collection of user-space tasks (servers), creating thus the multiserver nature of HelenOS.
Tasks communicate via HelenOS IPC, which is connection-oriented and asynchronous. It can be used to send small fixed-size messages, blocks of bytes or to negotiate sharing of memory. Messages can be forwarded without copying bulk data or mapping memory to the address space of middle-men tasks.
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