The Sartoris Project aim is to develop a portable microkernel and a set of operating system services that support:
- The efficient implementation of local system calls.
- Concurrent execution of several OS 'personalities', ie a UNIX environment and a native microkernel-based interface.
- Simple and elegant integration of distributed operating system components.
The microkernel implements a minimal system call set, that presents the following abstractions to the operating system:
- Tasks. A task is composed by a virtual address space, a set of inter task communication objects, and a set of permissions for accessing the input/output address space.
- Threads. A thread is a path of execution within a task. The interrupt handling in a Sartoris-based system is performed using interrupt-driven threads.
- Messaging. The microkernel implements an asynchronous fixed-length inter-task messaging system.
- Shared memory. The microkernel memory-sharing mechanism allows a task to share portions of its address space with other tasks in a secure way. In systems that support paging, this will be implemented using memory aliasing.
