Design Goals
Quark microkernel borrows concepts from L4 microkernel family but is not an L4 implementation itself. For example the clan, id concept and recursive address mapping comes from L4. Quark also has an asynchronous/synchronous message interface similar to Amiga's Exec kernel but adapted to the memory protected environment.
Other Quark features include:
- High Super/Usermode switch speed
- Low interrupt latency
- IntThreads and Int P-code abstraction
- Symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP)
- Task/Thread and Clan/Chief model
- Resource tracking
- Virtual memory (optional)
- Distributed computing
- No access to kernel structures
- Clean design with an elegant API
- Micro/pico kernel mixture
For this new kernel a hardware abstraction layer is used which provides the necessary hardware resource information like scanning all zorro boards, PCI boards and local hardware resources.
Read more about this topic: Quark (kernel)
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