Headquarters Chicago Type of business Private | Founded 2006 | |
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Fate Acquired by General Dynamics C4 Systems Key people Steve Subar, founder and CEO, Gernot Heiser, founder and CTO Products OKL4 microkernels and hypervisor Website gdmissionsystems.com/open-kernel-labs/ | ||
About open kernel labs with gernot heiser
Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) is a privately owned company that develops microkernel-based hypervisors and operating systems for embedded systems. The company was founded in 2006 by Steve Subar and Gernot Heiser as a spinout from NICTA. It is headquartered in Chicago, while research and development was located in Sydney, Australia. The company was acquired by General Dynamics in September 2012.
Contents
- About open kernel labs with gernot heiser
- OKL4 Microvisor
- Paravirtualized guest OSes
- Hardware virtualization
- Background
- Acquisition
- References
OKL4 Microvisor
OKL4 is an open source system software platform for embedded systems that can be used as a hypervisor as well as a simple real-time operating system with memory protection. The OKL4 Microvisor is a variant of the L4 microkernel. The OKL4 Microvisor is a Type I hypervisor and runs on single- and multi-core platforms based on ARM, x86 and MIPS processors.
OKL4 has been deployed on over 1.5 billion devices, mostly mobile phones, both as a baseband operating system and for hosting guest operating systems. Most notable and visible is the company's design win at Motorola for the Evoke QA4 messaging phone, the first phone which employs virtualization to support two concurrent operating systems (Linux and BREW) on a single processor core.
Paravirtualized guest OSes
OK Labs also supplies ready-to-integrate paravirtualized guest application operating systems, including OK:Symbian (SymbianOS), OK:Linux (Linux), OK:Windows (Windows) and OK:Android (Android).
Hardware virtualization
The OKL4 Microvisor supports ARM hardware virtualization extensions, as introduced in the Cortex-A15 processor. The use of hardware virtualization greatly reduces the changes required to a guest OS.
Background
OK Labs and OKL4 are the result of collaboration among academia, business, and open-source development. OK Labs technology is derived from the L4 microkernel which originated in the early 1990s at German research Lab GMD, further developed at IBM Watson Research Center, the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, the University of New South Wales and NICTA. As commercial ventures, OK Labs and OKL4 were launched by NICTA in 2006, with additional investment by Citrix and other venture partners. OK Labs technology continues to benefit from ties to academia and research projects, to NICTA, and to the global open-source community.
Acquisition
The company was acquired by General Dynamics in September 2012 and has since closed its Sydney office. In February 2014, Cog Systems was founded by former Open Kernel Labs staff and continues OKL4 development in Sydney.