> Essentially, it's a collection of device drivers. Plus memory management, interrupt handling, and some other stuff, everything you would expect from a single

> Essentially, it's a collection of device drivers. Plus memory management, interrupt handling, and some other stuff, everything you would expect from a single-tasking kernel. > and nothing of it is on the Linux side You likely mean the kernel. There is more to Linux/Unix than just the kernel. You can even have your dynamically modifiable scheduler in the userland if you want. And for the (few) people who really think full dynamic modifiability is a relevant requirement, there are also some other technologies which offer similar flexibility as Smalltalk, or somewhere between (as e.g. the Gnome Window manager with GTK operated via a scripting language, or Stump, Sawfish, Qtile, etc.). The kernel which runs below Smalltalk (or the Smalltalk interpreter, i.e. the thing which runs the Smalltalk bytecode and manages object memory) neither "change behaviour at runtime". So if we do the correct comparision, there is not much difference when it comes to runtime modifiability.