Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 15th May 2006 10:15 UTC, submitted by Andy Tanenbaum
And no, the microkernel debate is not over yet. In a reply to various comments made over the past few weeks, Andy Tanenbaum has written an article to address these. He first clearly states he respects and likes Torvalds, and that "we may disagree on some technical issues, but that doesn't make us enemies. Please don't confuse disagreements about ideas with personal feuds." The article states: "Over the years there have been endless postings on forums such as Slashdot about how microkernels are slow, how microkernels are hard to program, how they aren't in use commercially, and a lot of other nonsense. Virtually all of these postings have come from people who don't have a clue what a microkernel is or what one can do. I think it would raise the level of discussion if people making such postings would first try a microkernel-based operating system [...]. Has a lot more credibility."
Thread beginning with comment 124831
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-08-29
Member since:
2006-03-08
"Monolithic kernel doesn't provide you with ability to fine grain control permission of different system components because it utilises much faster and much simpler memory sharing techniques, rather then IPC. Of course, you can implement access control lists but then you are back at the beginning with performance problems."
Hum you do realize that Shared memory and Message passing are both ways to do IPC (Inter Process Communication)right ? Monolithic kernel DO IPC when they use Shared Memory among 2 or more processes.
I got to admit than Windows way of dealing whith IPCs is interesting for example when a process needs to communicate a small amount of datas (<= 256 Bytes) it uses the message passing IPC facility but when the amount of datas to be transfered exceeds 256 Bytes the Shared memory IPC facility is used, it's a fast and intelligent way of doing IPCs.
" It's not so simple as you think."
I completely agree with you on that one !!! :-D