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A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or separate regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. [ 1 ] [ a ] Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour.
Microkernel (also abbreviated μK or uK) is the term describing an approach to operating system design by which the functionality of the system is moved out of the traditional "kernel", into a set of "servers" that communicate through a "minimal" kernel, leaving as little as possible in "system space" and as much as possible in "user space".
This is a compromise between kernel-level ("1:1") and user-level ("N:1") threading. In general, "M:N" threading systems are more complex to implement than either kernel or user threads, because changes to both kernel and user-space code are required [clarification needed]. In the M:N implementation, the threading library is responsible for ...
In most existing systems, switching from user mode to kernel mode has an associated high cost in performance. It has been measured, on the basic request getpid, to cost 1000–1500 cycles on most machines. Of these just around 100 are for the actual switch (70 from user to kernel space, and 40 back), the rest is "kernel overhead".
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, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC).
In computer operating systems, a light-weight process (LWP) is a means of achieving multitasking.In the traditional meaning of the term, as used in Unix System V and Solaris, a LWP runs in user space on top of a single kernel thread and shares its address space and system resources with other LWPs within the same process.
A kernel is a component of a computer operating system. [1] A comparison of system kernels can provide insight into the design and architectural choices made by the developers of particular operating systems.
Linux API, Linux ABI, and in-kernel APIs and ABIs. The Linux kernel provides multiple interfaces to user-space and kernel-mode code that are used for varying purposes and that have varying properties by design. There are two types of application programming interface (API) in the Linux kernel: the "kernel–user space" API; and; the "kernel ...