Download L4 User Manual

Preface
This manual grew out of lecture notes for a course on Advanced Operating Systems given by Gernot Heiser at UNSW in July–November 1997. In that course students had to build a small operating
system on top of L4/MIPS which had previously been developed at UNSW by Kevin Elphinstone
with lots of help from Jochen Liedtke. We would like to thank the 44 students of that course (one of
whom was Alan Au) for their interest and patience, as well as for their questions which prompted the
lecturer to write and provide further documentation. We would further like to thank Jochen Liedtke
for providing the L4 specification and the original reference manual, Kevin Elphinstone for the MIPS
implementation as well as for explaining L4’s idiosyncrasies, the OS group at the Technical University of Dresden under Herrman Härtig for example code, C bindings and manual pages, and Jerry
Vochteloo and many others for their contributions.
It is expected that this manual will continue to grow as more people are learning to use L4,
and consequently discover shortcomings of the documentation. We welcome comments, corrections and enhancements and will try to incorporate them quickly into the manual. The latest version of this manual (as well as of the L4/MIPS Reference Manual [EHL97]) are available from
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/˜disy.