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Microkernels are not superior from a technical perspective, but from a software engineering perspective. -Monolithic kernels do not enforce modular implementat
by tybris 17y ago
Microkernels are not superior from a technical perspective, but from a software engineering perspective.
-Monolithic kernels do not enforce modular implementations, inevitably leading to unnecessary dependencies
-Monolithic kernels need to be developed by a single party, who could not possibly manage such a large code base. The result is poorly maintained code.
-Monolithic kernels need to be recompiled to turn off features (and I have better things to do)
-Microkernels can tolerate more bugs (may be good or bad)
-probably a couple more
- vidarh 17y agoThe Linux kernel is monolithic, yet it provably does not "need to be developed by a single party" given the Linux development model - a lot of features are added in isolation by third parties and only added to mainline when they are mature and have a userbase. Nor does the Linux kernel need to be recompiled to turn on/off features - most features can be turned on/off via /proc or sysctl or by loading / unloading modules. As for the unnecessary dependencies, is this a problem in real life for Linux? No. Modules tend to depend on well defined kernel interfaces.