Zikimi: A Case Study in Micro Kernel Design for Multimedia Applications

Due to recent rapid deployment of Internet Appliances and PostPC products, the importance of developing lightweight embedded operating system is being emphasized more. In this article, we like to present the details of design and implementation experience of low cost embedded system, Zikimi, for multimedia data processing. We use the skeleton of existing Linux operating system and develop a micro-kernel to perform a number of specific tasks efficiently and effectively. Internet Appliances and PostPC products usually have very limited amount of hardware resources to execute very specific tasks. We carefully analyze the system requirement of multimedia processing device. Weremove the unnecessary features, e.g. virtual memory, multitasking, a number of different file systems, and etc. The salient features of Zikimi micro kernel are (i) linear memory system and (ii) user level control of I/O device. The result of performance experiment shows that LMS (linear memory system) of Zikimi micro kernel achieves significant performance improvement on memory allocationagainst legacy virtual memory management system of Linux. By exploiting the computational capability of graphics processor and its local memory, we achieve 2.5 times increase in video processing speed. Supported by KOSEF through Statistical Research Center for Complex Systems at Seoul National University. Funded by Faculty Research Institute Program 2001, Sahmyook University, Korea. Sang-Yeob Lee received his B.S. and M.S degree from Hanyang University, seoul, Korea in 1995. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in Devision of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of Information Management System at Sahmyook university, Seoul, Korea. His research interests include robot vision systems, pattern recognition, Multimedia systems. He is a member of IEEE. Youjip Won received the B.S and M.S degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1990 and 1992, respectively and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1997. After finishing his Ph.D., He worked as Server Performance Analysts at Server Architecture Lab., Intel Corp. Since 1999, he has been on the board of faculty members in Division of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. His current research interests include Multimedia Systems, Internet Technology, Database and Performance Modeling and Analysis. He is a member of ACM and IEEE. Whoi-Yul Kim received his B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea in 1980. He received his M.S. from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 1983 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University, West Lafayette, in 1989, both in Electrical Engineering. From 1989 to 1994, he was with the Erick Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Since 1994, he has been on the faculty of Electronic Engineering at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. He has been involved with research development of various range sensors and their use in robot vision systems. Recently, his work has focused on content-based image retrieval system. He is a member of IEEE.