Knit: Component Composition for Systems Software

Alastair Reid, Matthew Flatt, Leigh Stoller, Jay Lepreau, and Eric Eide

University of Utah, School of Computing
50 South Central Campus Drive, Room 3190
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9205

{reid,mflatt,stoller,lepreau,eeide}@cs.utah.edu
http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/

Abstract

Knit is a new component definition and linking language for systems code. Knit helps make C code more understandable and reusable by third parties, helps eliminate much of the performance overhead of componentization, detects subtle errors in component composition that cannot be caught with normal component type systems, and provides a foundation for developing future analyses over C-based components, such as cross-component optimization. The language is especially designed for use with component kits, where standard linking tools provide inadequate support for component configuration. In particular, we developed Knit for use with the OSKit, a large collection of components for building low-level systems. However, Knit is not OSKit-specific, and we have implemented parts of the Click modular router in terms of Knit components to illustrate the expressiveness and flexibility of our language. This paper provides an overview of the Knit language and its applications.

Appeared in Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2000), pages 347-360, San Diego, CA, October 2000.

The slides from the talk are available in various formats:


Eric Eide <eeide@cs.utah.edu>
Last modified: Nov 30 2000