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From the historical point of view, this heavy decoupling is associated with microkernels which fell out of favor with the rise of the Linux kernel. I think in t

From the historical point of view, this heavy decoupling is associated with microkernels which fell out of favor with the rise of the Linux kernel. I think in this day and age, modern programming languages could make building a microkernel that doesn't fall prey to the shortcomings of MINIX a possibility.

d33 8y ago
Microkernels are IPC-heavy, right? What I rather imagine is having modules at source level, not kernel level. So the thing still compiles down to a monolith/hybrid, but modules are abstracted away and reusable.
- fooker 8y ago
  Source level modules sound awesome. Would need a high level language though.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    Like Rust?
    - fooker 8y ago
      Maybe, I would personally go with C++.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  The IPC overhead is very much manageable, microkernels tend to be a lot more responsive than monoliths and with paging for message passing the overhead is reduced even further.
badosu 8y ago
It would be interesting to see if modern multi-core cpus make the possible overhead of microkernels a non-issue today.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Microkernels are much easier to optimize for multi-core CPUs than monoliths. The ´kernel modules´ from a monolith run as user processes in a microkernel environment so they automatically benefit from more cores.
pjmlp 8y ago
Except that most kernels for high integrity computing or hard real time deployments are microkernels.