The open-source OKL4 microkernel, developed by Australia's Center of Excellence for Information and Computing Technology (NICTA), is about to receive a strong commercial push. Open Kernel (OK) Labs, a NICTA spinoff, is setting up its U.S. headquarters in Chicago and is rolling out a commercial support package for OKL4.
OKL4, under development at NICTA for the past four years, is an open-source microkernel aimed at embedded consumer and mobile devices. It claims fast performance and supports virtualization, real-time programming, software componentization, fine-grained protection domains, and dynamic resource partitioning. As a microkernel, it only contains code that executes in privileged processor mode.