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,
    publisher        = {ACM},
    doi              = {10.1145/2349896.2349909},
    author           = {Blackham, Bernard and Heiser, Gernot},
    month            = jul,
    slides           = {http://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nicta_slides/5858.pdf},
    year             = {2012},
    keywords         = {optimization, microkernels, verification, trustworthy systems},
    title            = {Correct, fast, maintainable --- choose any three!},
    booktitle        = {Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys)},
    pages            = {7},
    address          = {Seoul, Korea}
  }

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