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Mach is not a very good microkernel at all, because the overhead is much higher than necessary. The L4 family’s IPC design is substantially more efficient, and
by johncolanduoni 9mo ago
Mach is not a very good microkernel at all, because the overhead is much higher than necessary. The L4 family’s IPC design is substantially more efficient, and that’s why they’re used in actual systems. Fuchsia/Zircon have improved on the model further.
Someone will of course bring up XNU, but the microkernel aspect of it died when they smashed the FreeBSD kernel into the codebase. DriverKit has brought some userspace drivers back, but they use shared memory for all the heavy lifting.
- saagarjha 9mo ago> Mach is not a very good microkernel at all, because the overhead is much higher than necessary. The L4 family’s IPC design is substantially more efficient, and that’s why they’re used in actual systems. As opposed to Mach, which is not used in any actual systems
- johncolanduoni 9mo agoI mentioned XNU below. It doesn’t really count as a microkernel if you, you know, don’t actually use the microkernel part. At least for the 30 years between the FreeBSD collision and the introduction of DriverKit, which does most of its IPC through shared memory (because the mach ports are not efficient enough, I would assume).
- saagarjha 9mo agoYes, but a lot of other things use Mach messages.
- johncolanduoni 9mo agoAll the major OSes have components of the larger operating system that run in userspace and communicate via IPC, including Linux. But userspace drivers and basic system services (VFS, network stack, etc.) are very limited in their use of userspace/IPC. If macOS is a microkernel in the sense of those built on L4, then so are Windows and Linux, and the word doesn't have any meaning anymore.
- saagarjha 9mo agoIs that IPC called Mach?
- johncolanduoni 9mo agoYes, and it’s quite inefficient compared to L4 or Zircon’s IPC so it isn’t used for anything that wouldn’t work just fine over a SEQPACKET socket using SCM_RIGHTS like Linux does. Is modern Windows a microkernel because ALPC exists?