In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my desktop. BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was buggy and crashed often, bu

In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my desktop. BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was buggy and crashed often, but being a userspace driver, I just got a popup asking permission to restart the driver. Conversely, a couple years later I had an OSX laptop, and a corrupted backup CD that would kernel panic OSX, Win2k, and Linux. (Honestly, ISO 9660 and FAT32 drivers should be migrated out of mainstream OS kernels, since kernel latency is very far from being the bottleneck when using thunmb drives or CDs.) On the other hand, BeOS had some questionable uses of metadata. After improperly using tar to backup my home directory before a reinstall, I lost all of my NetPositive browser bookmarks. I didn't realize each bookmark was a zero-sized file with the URL actually stored in metadata. My improper backup procedure dropped the metadata fork. Also, there was a kernel bug related to semaphores. I had some semaphore code that worked fine under Linux but would kernel panic BeOS. Had Apple purchased Be, we'd likely have a much lighter weight OSX, though perhaps with poorer support for multiple users. I'm still hoping that someday QNX RTP gets open-sourced. A hard real-time light weight microkernel OS was fun to play around with. In particular, a cache benchmark I ran for a systems class showed quite a bit smaller cache footprint for QNX vs. Debian. (Though, Debian almost certainly had more daemons running, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison of kernel cache footprints.)