Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Compiling the Kernel as a Library
Octavian Purdila came up with a way to compile the kernel as a static library, called LKL (Linux Kernel Library), making all of its interfaces available to software running on other operating systems. The goal, Octavian said, was "to allow reusing the Linux kernel code as extensively as possible with minimal effort and reduced maintenance overhead."
Octavian distinguished LKL from UML (User Mode Linux), pointing out that UML offered a full operating system environment, with corresponding infrastructure requirements like filesystems and processes, whereas LKL is a programming library with a set of function APIs that any program could link to and use.
Richard Weinberger said that this librarification "eliminates UML's most problematic areas, system call handling via ptrace() and virtual memory management via SIGSEGV."
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