I'm glad AST has restarted the Minix project. It's a great little kernel that deserves much more attention. One of the bits of research that could allow for man

I'm glad AST has restarted the Minix project. It's a great little kernel that deserves much more attention. One of the bits of research that could allow for many more interesting things is use of the IOMMU for drivers [1]. The given paper unfortunately does not give benchmarks, but I imagine that it's an area that you could see some rather sizable performance benefits in a microkernel-style system; with an IOMMU, there could potentially be zero context switches in an app's access of a resource, which could lead to even less CPU overhead than a monolithic kernel could be capable of. [1] http://www.minix3.org/docs/szekeres-iommu.pdf http://www.minix3.org/docs/szekeres-iommu.pdf