3 ms·
This is why we need microkernels.
by snakeanus 9y ago
This is why we need microkernels.
- geofft 9y agoCan you explain this position? In particular, my impression is that a large reason of why microkernels failed in the '90s - see e.g. OSF/1 - was the overhead of message-passing. The two most popular kernels today that vaguely resemble microkernels, namely Darwin (Mach-based) and NT (with its subsystems), do no isolation between parts of their kernel and just have ordinary function calls. TLS exists in userspace and works extraordinarily well, but the desire to move parts into kernelspace is specifically to avoid the overhead of copying data between kernelspace and userspace and to allow using things like sendfile() that wouldn't be possible across address spaces.
- MrTonyD 9y agoI think he meant to say that we need unikernels - a lot of people (including me) sometimes make that same mistake.