Linked by David Adams on Wed 13th Aug 2008 16:57 UTC, submitted by irbis
"I recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of the extremely secure Unix-like operating sytem MINIX 3. Andrew is also the author of Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the must-have book on programming and designing operating systems, and the man whose work inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux. He has published over 120 works on computers (that's including manuals, second and third editions, and translations), and his works are known all over the world, being translated into a variety of different languages for educational use universally. He is currently a professor of computer science at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
They're not hybrid kernels, they are monolithic kernels. Being a microkernel implies a specific structure, and running a few things in userspace is not a qualifier. None of the kernels above are microkernels because they've discovered that performance an complexity sucks. They're problems that Apple has bypassed like a Christmas tree with Mach.
Whenever you see the name 'hybrid kernel' it's a kernel that has generally started off with lot of idealistic microkernel ideas and then discovered that, practically speaking, they suck in the real world. Either that, or you've got a monolithic kernel that wants to pretend it has some of the marketing advantages of microkernels. That's an easy definition.
If true, that should tell you something about the driver and kernel development model there. A microkernel isn't going to help you because focusing on single drivers and worrying about what they do drags down the aggregate system as a whole.
Edited 2008-08-14 10:15 UTC