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Possibly, but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex; there is nothing else to do all the things that it does. Whereas for BIOS and EFI the ar
by pebers 9y ago
Possibly, but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex; there is nothing else to do all the things that it does. Whereas for BIOS and EFI the argument would be that they should do as little as possible to hand over to the real operating system.
- AstralStorm 9y agoOr at least possible to reduce to a minimum start-up set. Which is possible with EFI but thanks to mainboard manufacturers and Intel and AMD being secretive plus crypto signing everything... not at all.
- garmaine 9y ago> but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex I would like to offer, as a counter example, every micro kernel ever.
- zaarn 9y agoYou mean all those micro kernels that are in widespread use and see huge market shares? The closest relative is NT and that is a hybrid, not purely micro. Modular and hybrid kernels (Linux and NT respectively) offer better external vs internal complexity tradeoffs; Linux and NT are internally complex since they do all the hard stuff, micorkernels are externally complex since someone else needs to do the hard work. Microkernels will shove this exact complexity elsewhere not make it go away.
- garmaine 9y agoThe most prolific (non-embedded) operating system on the planet is MINIX, a micro kernel based OS. On the embedded, medical, automotive, and aviation side there are plenty of micro kernel OS’s that give Linux a run for its money. Just FYI.
- zaarn 9y agoBut is that because it's a microkernel or for other reasons? Crash stability can be achieved in monolithic and modular kernels too, it's not unique to microkernels.
- ahartmetz 9y agoQNX is reasonably widely used and a quite elegant system. Among other things, it runs the user-facing electronics of several car brands.
- icebraining 9y agoIt's not obvious that a micro kernel plus all the modules necessary to do what Linux does is less complex.