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 Open Kernel Labs logo | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computersoftware |
| Founded | 2006; 19 years ago (2006) inSydney,Australia |
| Fate | Acquired byGeneral Dynamics C4 Systems |
| Successor | Cog Systems |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
Key people | Steve Subar, cofounder, CEO Gernot Heiser, cofounder, CTO |
| Products | OKL4microkernels andhypervisor |
| Website | gdmissionsystems |
Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) is a privately owned company that developsmicrokernel-basedhypervisors andoperating systems forembedded systems. The company was founded in 2006 by Steve Subar andGernot Heiser as a spinout fromNICTA. It was headquartered inChicago, whileresearch and development was located inSydney,Australia. The company was acquired byGeneral Dynamics in September 2012.[1]
The OKL4 Microvisor is anopen-source software system software platform forembedded systems that can be used as ahypervisor, and as a simplereal-time operating system withmemory protection. It is a variant of theL4microkernel. OKL4 is a Type I hypervisor and runs on single- andmulti-core processors based onARM,MIPS, andx86 processors.[2]
OKL4 has been deployed on over 2 billion mobile phones,[3] both as abaseband processor operating system and for hosting guest operating systems. Most notable and visible is the company's design win atMotorola for the Evoke QA4 messaging phone, the first phone which employs virtualization to support two concurrent operating systems (Linux andBinary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW)) on one processor core.[4]
OK Labs also supplies ready-to-integrate paravirtualized guest application operating systems, including OK:Symbian (SymbianOS), OK:Linux (Linux), OK:Windows (Windows) and OK:Android (Android).
The OKL4 Microvisor supports ARM hardware virtualization extensions, as introduced in the Cortex-A15 processor. The use of hardware virtualization greatly reduces the changes required to a guest OS.
OK Labs and OKL4 are the result of collaboration among academia, business, and open-source development. OK Labs technology is derived from theL4 microkernel which originated in the early 1990s at German research Lab GMD, further developed atIBM Watson Research Center, theUniversity of Karlsruhe in Germany, theUniversity of New South Wales andNICTA in Australia. As commercial ventures, OK Labs and OKL4 were launched by NICTA in 2006, with further investment byCitrix and other venture partners. OK Labs technology continues to benefit from ties to academia and research projects, to NICTA, and to the global open-source community.
The company was acquired byGeneral Dynamics in September 2012 and has since closed its Sydney office. In February 2014, Cog Systems was founded by former Open Kernel Labs staff and continued OKL4 development in Sydney. In April 2019, Cog Systems went into liquidation and closed.[5]
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