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:
2005-06-29
I don't think that just theory and debates via e-mail are the best way to benchmark this claims... benchmarks and real-world usage are probably a lot more relevant.
Some things should be in the table too... like the fact that we're living in a world where the type of information processed and the way processors (CPU and GPU/GPGPU) work, and also how this processing is done (not just predictable data, but live data from the network and the internet... where scheduling has a really large hole in the final performance.)
As for the benchmark, BeOS/Haiku is a nice contender for the tests.
BeOS/Haiku example is even nicer, because originally, its Network stack was all user space, but eventually got changed to a kernel space one.
The thing is, there's no one answer for everything, but better answers for each situation. If you have a highly predictable use scenario, a monolithic kernel could be the best answer, as is complexity will probably be smaller. If you have a highly complex system, with hundreds of different software connecting together, and complexity is your main issue... you may prefer to isolate each process, run as much as you can in user space... depending of you use scenario, you may not see any performance loss, but you may find the hole system a lot easier of maintain and a lot easier to find bugs, extend, etc...
Again, BeOS/Haiku may show you the kind of "perceivable performance" gains and harmonic utilization of system resources by various processes...