Design of IPC and System Calls for Multi-Process Micro-Kernel Embedded OS on ARM

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of IPC (Inter-Process Communication) and system calls for an embedded OS in technical details, including the overview of micro-kernel OS, mechanism of inter-process communication, and implementation of message passing as well as system calls upon it. The IPC and system calls are designed for the ARM based multi-process micro-kernel embedded operating system developed by the author of this paper on Linux platform with GNU tool chain. The design of the system call service function to create a child process identical to the parent, do_fork (), is provided as an example. Practices prove that multi-process micro-kernel mechanism is technically feasible on embedded machines.