Linked by Bahadir on Mon 7th Dec 2009 18:24 UTC
The Codezero team has released version 0.2 of their L4 microkernel. In this release, the microkernel is fully capability checked, and they introduced the notion of containers to provide isolated execution environments.
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Specially when we're talking about microkernels 
Actually, L4 is so tiny that Liedtke called it a "nanokernel". It would probably qualify as a hypervisor today.
Liedtke was running multiple instances of Linux side by side with L4 "native" apps in the late 1990's with only a 3-5% performance degradation.
Damn cool stuff, and the L4 core was only a couple thousand lines of code if memory serves.
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"Personally, I'm _not_ interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid."
— Linus Torvalds
— Linus Torvalds
Linus probably said that in 1994. The cpus have become much stronger and the linux kernel's value as a component now outweighs its ability to do fast tlb and cache flushes on its own. So running everything monolithically with a single kernel is not that relevant anymore.
RE[2]: Comment by diego
by braddock on Wed 9th Dec 2009 15:55 UTC
in reply to "RE: Comment by diego"
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linux kernel's value as a component now outweighs its ability to do fast tlb and cache flushes on its own. So running everything monolithically with a single kernel is not that relevant anymore.
That is why Liedtke's work led directly to what I think was one of the most exciting OS projects of the late 1990's - IBM's Sawmill project, an attempt to break up the Linux kernel services to run as components on L4.
http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~jklein/GIFG/liedtke.pdf
Does anyone know why Sawmill died? It conincided with Liedtke's death, but I don't know if that was a major factor.
RE[2]: Comment by diego
by diegoviola on Thu 10th Dec 2009 12:13 UTC
in reply to "RE: Comment by diego"
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""Personally, I'm _not_ interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid."
— Linus Torvalds
— Linus Torvalds
Linus probably said that in 1994. "
He said that in 2002.
http://groups.google.com/group/mlist.linux.kernel/msg/938ffa86ae60d...
Edited 2009-12-10 12:14 UTC
RE[3]: Comment by diego
by strcpy on Thu 10th Dec 2009 12:14 UTC
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by diego"
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