Jochen Liedtke

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Prof. Dr. Jochen Liedtke, Ph.D. (1953 – 10 June 2001) was a German computer scientist, noted for his work on microkernels, especially the creation of the L4 microkernel family.

Liedtke's work on the Elan programming language in the 1970s led him to create Eumel, an innovative run-time environment for Elan. In 1984, he joined the GMD (Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, or Society for Mathematics and Information technology, which is now a part of the Fraunhofer Society) and began working on L3, a successor to Eumel. At a time when microkernels were losing favour because of the relatively high cost of message passing, he demonstrated that careful design and implementation could drastically reduce IPC costs.^[1] He also proposed using a hierarchy of external pagers, an important feature of modern microkernels.^[2]

Liedtke also worked on computer architecture, inventing guarded page tables as a means of implementing a sparsely-mapped 64-bit address space.^[3] In 1996, Liedtke completed a PhD on guarded page tables at the Technical University of Berlin. He then joined the Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he began work on L4. In 1999, he became a professor at the University of Karlsruhe. He died unexpectedly in 2001.

[edit] References

^ Jochen Liedtke. "Improving IPC by Kernel Design", Proc. 14th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), December 1993
^ Jochen Liedtke. "On µ-Kernel Construction", Proc. 15th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), December 1995
^ Jochen Liedtke. "Page Table Structures for Fine-Grain Virtual Memory", Technical Report 872, German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD), October 1994.