USENIX 2002 Annual Conference - Technical Program Abstract
The JX Operating System
Michael Golm, Meik Felser, Christian Wawersich, Jürgen Kleinöder,
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
Abstract
This paper describes the architecture and performance
of the JX operating system. JX is both an operating system
completely written in Java and a runtime system for Java
applications.
Our work demonstrates that it is possible to build a complete
operating system in Java, achieve a good performance,
and still benefit from the modern software-technology
of this object-oriented, type-safe language. We explain
how an operating system can be structured that is no longer
build on MMU protection but on type safety.
JX is based on a small microkernel which is responsible
for system initialization, CPU context switching, and low-level
protection-domain management. The Java code is
organized in components, which are loaded into domains,
verified, and translated to native code. Domains can be
completely isolated from each other.
The JX architecture allows a wide range of system configurations,
from fast and monolithic to very flexible, but
slower configurations.
We compare the performance of JX with Linux by using
two non-trivial operating system components: a file system
and an NFS server. Furthermore we discuss the performance
impact of several alternative system configurations.
In a monolithic configuration JX achieves between about
40% and 100% Linux performance in the file system bench-mark
and about 80% in the NFS benchmark.
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