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Yes and there's a very good reason: Linux is safe enough, more efficient, and more scalable.
by phendrenad2 2y ago
Yes and there's a very good reason: Linux is safe enough, more efficient, and more scalable.
- vacuity 2y agoI suppose I should ask the other side too, though I am biased to favor microkernels, and am better read on them, but how so? "Safe enough" measured by the standards of this upside-down industry...I'll let everyone decide that for themselves. "More efficient": while monolithic kernels have a higher ceiling, currently there's plenty of OS research papers and industry work demonstrating that more integration with userspace brings performance benefits, such as in the scheduler, storage, or memory management. Microkernels encourage/enforce userspace integration. "More scalable": I think this has less to do with kernelspace scale and more with how nodes are connected. See Barrelfish[0] for eschewing shared memory in favor of message passing entirely, running separate kernels on each core. Meanwhile Linux has gradually discovered a "big lock" approach is not scalable and reduced coarse-grained locks, added RCU, etc.. So I think we will go moreso towards Barrelfish. But on a single core, for what goes into the kernel, that's covered by everything but scalability. [0] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/sosp09-barrelfish.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/sosp09-barrelfish.pd...
- naasking 2y ago"Safe enough" means "actually unsafe".
- phendrenad2 2y agoYes, and bank vaults have doors.