Kernux 1.0

Kernux project is a fully kernel-mode http-daemon for Linux. Currently Kernux is in its developing stage. Similiar developments in the same area were khttpd by Arjan van de van and Tux web-server by Ingo Molnar.

Khttpd was included in the linux testing kernel 2.5 by Linus Torvalds. But it was actually not in kernel-mode of operation. Also it handled dynamic requests which is assumed to be insecure for the server OS by the Linux kernel developers.

Tux is another implementation of kernel mode http-daemon, being developed by RedHat. The developer is Ingo Molnar, the creator of O(n) scheduler, which control the procsses from Linux kernel version 7.2 onwards.

Kernux works as a kernel module, like a device driver. It uses low-level socket operations to handle the client requests. Kernux consist of a number of threads running parallely in the OS level (kernel_threads). An idle kernel-thread receive a connection from a wait queue, maintained at the Operating System level and serves it.

The pacularity is that, it uses no duplication of sockets what other servers do, but a single socket, whose access by multiple kernel-threads is maintained by a mutual exclusion system. Each thread, after analysing the request type, ie. whether it is static or dynamic, serves the client. The system is presently configured to handle only static requests. The dynamic requests are handled to a user-mode webserver of users choice, like Apache.