DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai out of India are aiming to redesign the Linux kernel as MOOL, or the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux. The project site explains, ”MOOL (Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux) aims at redesigning the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of OO (Object Oriented) abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in existing kernel. Studies have shown that common coupling is increasing in successive versions of Linux. This will make maintainability of Linux difficult in coming years. As a starting step we have tried to reduce the number of global variables of the kernel. Some global variables are used only by two or three kernel modules. These are passed as function arguments. The performance of the modified kernel is measured with the standard performance analysis tools. The modified kernel performs almost same as original. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules.”
» Michael Larabel | phoronix.com