3 ms·
All circumstances where correctness and security are more important than maximum possible performance, once it's mature enough (which will probably never happen
by devit 2y ago
All circumstances where correctness and security are more important than maximum possible performance, once it's mature enough (which will probably never happen), since it provides a proper and secure architecture.
- RetroTechie 2y agoWhich is basically everywhere. Well-designed microkernels have been proven to have only a minor impact on performance, afaik. Especially if said kernel is small enough to fit in a cpu's L1 or L2 cache entirely. With that in mind, I'd say there's few cases left where users would not want to take a minor performance hit, if that gets rid of entire classes of bugs & vulnerabilities. Reasons this isn't the norm these days are mostly historic. But going forward, a good midpoint would be popular OS kernels like Linux split into smaller components, while providing same user-space APIs. Along the lines of how XFree86 was modularized into a set of Xorg libraries. Maybe L4Linux could be an example? (dunno how modular that is though). On such a componentized system, components could be shared among multiple 'OS personalities'. Kinda like a multi-VM setup but finer grained with much more shared code, much reduced attack surface for individual components, while maintaining very strong isolation guarantees between components.
- snvzz 2y agoseL4 is not doing badly in the performance side. It is even seen beating Linux in the slides.