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What used to be UNSW's DiSy group is now part of the Embedded, Real-Time and Operating-Systems (ERTOS) Research Program at National ICT Australia (NICTA).

Up-to-date information on our L4 activities can be found at the ERTOS L4 site.

For general information on L4 refer to L4HQ.

The L4 microkernel was developed and implemented on ix86 platforms by Jochen Liedtke, then at GMD, Germany. Liedtke continued development of the Intel version of L4 while at IBM TJ Watson Research Center and later at the University of Karlsruhe.

We have developed L4 implementations for several platforms:

L4/MIPS: a stable version for the MIPS R4x00 processor, to our knowledge the world's fastest kernel for that architecture.
L4/Alpha: a stable version for Alpha multiprocessors, which was based on a rudimentary kernel developed at the Technical University of Dresden. This is the first released SMP version of L4.

The above kernels are obsolete now that the portable Pistachio kernel has been released. We have contributed the MIPS and Alpha ports of that kernel. We have also done a port to the StrongARM architecture, which will be released soon. We are also working on a version for the 64-bit IBM Power architecture and may commence a SPARC port later this year.