4 ms·
I'm not an expert in this but I think the issue is one of tradeoffs. I think I remember reading (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that broadly generalized, mic
by acabal 15y ago
I'm not an expert in this but I think the issue is one of tradeoffs. I think I remember reading (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that broadly generalized, microkernels have better security at the expense of performance, vice versa for macrokernels. See the "Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate" on Wikipedia.
Either way I'm interested to see if HURD will ever take off in any real sense. For example, could we see an Ubuntu/HURD mix in 5 or 10 years? Will it even matter with that kind of timeframe? Would there ever be any practical advantage to use HURD vs Linux besides more "freedoms"?
- plq 15y ago> I think I remember reading (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that broadly generalized, microkernels have better security at the expense of performance, vice versa for macrokernels. that's true, but the "security" is not really what we perceive in the post-google, massively distributed era. microkernels made sense back when key to uptime was hot-swappable devices. e.g. if your nic goes awry due to a hardware problem, it can crash its driver. in case of a monolithic kernel, this would in turn crash the os, whereas with a microkernel, the rest of the system should continue humming just fine. this makes replacing the failed component possible without causing downtime by shutting down the single node the service runs on. but nowadays, we know how to set up systems so that taking down an entire node (gasp!) won't harm the operation of the service as a whole. so i don't think microkernels are that relevant anymore.