Gernot Heiser

Gernot Heiser (born 1957) is a Scientia Professor and the John Lions Chair for operating systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is also leader of the Software Systems Research Group (SSRG) at NICTA. In 2006 he co-founded Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs, acquired in 2012 by General Dynamics) to commercialise his L4 microkernel technology.

Life

Gernot Heiser was born in 1957. He studied physics at the German University of Freiburg, where he earned his BSc, went on to earn his MSc at the Canadian Brock University, and his PhD at the Swiss ETH Zurich.

Research

Heiser's research focuses on microkernels and microkernel-based systems as well as virtual machines, with a specific emphasis on performance and reliability.

His group produced the Mungi single address space operating system,^[1] aimed at clusters of 64-bit computers, and implementations of the L4 microkernel with very fast inter-process communication.^[2] His Gelato@UNSW team was a founding member of the Gelato Federation, and focused on performance and scalability of Linux on Itanium. They established theoretical and practical performance limits of message-passing IPC on Itanium.^[3]

Since joining NICTA at its creation in 2002, his research shifted away from high-end computing platforms towards embedded systems, with the specific aim of improving security, safety and reliability via the use of microkernel technology.^[4] This led to the development of a new microkernel called seL4, and its formal verification, claimed to be the first-ever complete proof of the functional correctness of a general-purpose OS kernel.^[5]

His work on virtualization was motivated by the need to provide a complete OS environment on his microkernels. His Wombat project followed the approach taken with the L4Linux project at Dresden, but was a multi-architecture paravirtualized Linux running on x86, ARM and MIPS hardware. The Wombat work later formed the basis for the OKL4 hypervisor of his company Open Kernel Labs.

The desire to reduce the engineering effort of paravirtualization led to the development of the soft layering approach of automated paravirtulization which was demonstrated on x86 and Itanium hardware.^[6] His vNUMA work demonstrated a hypervisor which presents a distributed system as a shared-memory multiprocessor as a possible model for many-core chips with large numbers of processor cores.^[7]

Device drivers are another focus of his work, including the first demonstration of user-mode drivers with a performance overhead of less than 10%,^[8] an approach to driver development that eliminates the majority of typical driver bugs by design,^[9] device drivers produced from device test benches,^[10] and a demonstration of the feasibility of the automatic generation of device drivers from formal specifications.^[11] Recent research also includes power management.^[12]

In the past he also worked on semiconductor device simulation, where he pioneered the use of multi-dimensional modeling in the optimisation of silicon-based solar cells.^[13]

Operating system projects

• seL4 3rd-generation microkernel
• L4.verified formal verification of seL4
• Dingo and Termite frameworks for reliable device drivers
• Koala framework for OS-level energy management
• vNUMA, a hypervisor providing shared virtual memory on a cluster
• Mungi and Iguana single address space operating systems
• Wombat portable Linux on L4 microkernel
• Gelato@UNSW performance and scalability of Linux on Itanium
• L4/MIPS 64-bit L4 microkernel on MIPS architecture

Teaching

• Advanced Operating Systems at UNSW

Awards

• Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) Fellow (2016). ^[14]
• IEEE Fellow (2016) "For contributions to security and safety of operating systems".
• ACS ICT Researcher of the Year (2015). ^[15]
• ACM Fellow (2014) "For contributions demonstrating that provably correct operating systems are feasible and suitable for real-world use". ^[16]
• Scientia Professor of the University of New South Wales
• 2010 Innovation Hero of The Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering at the University of Sydney
• NSW Scientist of the Year 2009 Category Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences
• Best Paper at the 22nd ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2009
• Best Paper at the 13th IEEE Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference, 2008
• Best Student Paper at the 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

Publications of Note

External links

• Gernot Heiser's home page
• Open Kernel Labs
• Staff page at UNSW
• Bio at OK Labs
• Bio at CSIRO with full publication list
• Visiting professor at Universität Karlsruhe