Editing Quark (kernel) (section)

==Design goals==

The Quark microkernel is not a member of the [[L4 microkernel family]], but borrows concepts from it, including: the ''clan'' (group of tasks), ID concept, and recursive address mapping. Quark also has an asynchronous/synchronous message interface similar to [[Amiga]]'s [[Exec (Amiga)|Exec]] kernel but adapted to an environment with [[memory protection]].

Other Quark features include:
* High super/usermode switch speed
* Low interrupt latency
* [[Interrupt]] [[Thread (computing)|threads]] (IntThreads) and Int [[P-code machine|P-code]] abstraction
* [[Symmetric multiprocessing]] (SMP)
* Models task/thread and clan/chief
* [[Resource tracking]]
* [[Virtual memory]] (optional)
* [[Distributed computing]]
* No access to [[Kernel (operating system)|kernel]] structures
* Clean design with an elegant application programming interface ([[API]])
* Micro/pico kernel mix

For this new kernel, a [[hardware abstraction layer]] is used which provides the needed hardware resource information like scanning all [[Amiga Zorro II]] bus boards, [[Peripheral Component Interconnect]] (PCI) boards, and local hardware resources.<ref name="WhatsThat">{{Cite news |title=MorphOS? What's that, then? |work=AmigActive |pages=14–17 |date=July 2000}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.ggsdata.se/Pegasos/Bilder/morphos_reference.pdf |title=MorphOS Full Features List |last=Gerber |first=David |year=2002 |access-date=2010-07-28}}</ref>