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"As a comparison, Mach’s micro-kernel without device drivers has 25530 lines of C code (calculated, we’re told, by counting semi-colons). By the same metric our
by tildeleb 11y ago
"As a comparison, Mach’s micro-kernel without device drivers has 25530 lines of C code (calculated, we’re told, by counting semi-colons). By the same metric our minimal kernel is only 4622 lines long, less than 1/5 the size. In fact, our kernel with every file system included is still less than half the size of their micro-kernel."
Plan 9, A Distributed System
Dave Presotto Rob Pike Ken Thompson Howard Trickey
1991 (I think)
'nuff said
- renox 11y agoExcept that it is again a comparison with Mach, what's the size of L4?
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoIt's a red herring, anyway. Microkernels aren't so much about size as they are about separation of concerns. Otherwise we'd have to conclude V7 Unix and DOS are both microkernels, which is preposterous.
- hga 11y agoThe verified down to the machine code and GPLed seL4 is only 9,000 line, and some of those are largely artifacts of the hand translation from Haskell to C. On the other hand, it doesn't do all that much for you, there's a lot of kernel type behavior you have to implement above it. But you are starting out with a relatively very small Trusted Computing Base (TCB).