Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 25th Dec 2008 07:50 UTC, submitted by diegocg
Heise Open Source provides an extensive breakdown of the innovations present in the latest release of the Linux kernel, announced by Linus Torvalds. This version adds the first version of Ext4 as a stable filesystem, the much-anticipated GPU memory manager which will be the foundation of a renewed graphic stack, support for Ultra Wide Band (Wireless USB, UWB-IP), memory management scalability and performance improvements, a boot tracer, disk shock protection, the phonet network protocol, support of SSD discard requests, transparent proxy support, high-resolution poll()/select()... full Changelog here
Permalink for comment 341627
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2007-08-20
'Monolithic' refers to the memory model used by the kernel. The Linux kernel, like many other common kernels (eg BSD, BeOS, Syllable), is monolithic because all kernel code including modules runs in the same memory space; ie any kernel code, whether compiled into the kernel or in a module, can access any variables or data structures of any other part of the kernel. A consequence of this is that a crash or bug in a module can corrupt the whole kernel.
The usual example of a non-monolithic kernel is Minix, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX.
One might actually say that Windows Vista is less monolithic than Linux, since the new video driver system has video drivers running in userspace. This means that a buggy video driver won't crash the whole system - it just gets safely restarted and everything goes on as usual.