According to the page that you have linked, "Below is a partial list of categories in which people have published after joining Google. There is also a list organized by year, and an atom feed is also available. "

These are not research projects specifically funded by Google, but rather published by people working at Google.

Put simply, when you have many independent bits of code competing for finite shared resources/time within the kernel (this is different than code just running in user space), you have to put locks on them so that only 1 thread can access them at a time. Once a lock is released then the another thread gets a turn. With a big lock, only one lock exists for every resource. Although a thread may only need access to a single resource, all of the resources get locked.

The alternative is to implement more fine-grained locks on each resource or set of resources. This allows two threads that are using different kernel resources to potentially execute in parallel. The danger is it's more complex and requires careful coding to avoid deadlock or race conditions. That help?

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/11/linux-2637-kills-the-big-kerne.html

Not that I'm aware of, but I used White Knight software back in the day to log onto BBSes.

May God have mercy on his soul. The only reason Notes should go open source is so its users can download the code and have the pleasure of deleting one file at a time.