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
vista is just another incarnation of NT iirc...
and i dont know if drivers running in user space makes things more secure. that would depend on what access rights those user space drivers have...
if it has the equivalent of root access, its only marginally better then linux or similar in that these days its less interesting to crash something then to zombify something.
also, microsoft tried microkernel, found performance to be to bad on some of the drivers, moved those back into kernel space, and now have moved some out again in vista.
i think the big issue with drivers are when they are closed source so that when a driver do something bad, one cant figure out what it did, only that it did something.
thats why one have tainted driver markers in the linux kernel log, for when something like the closed up nvidia drivers do something bad.
as for linus's opinion on micro-kernels, maybe they have changed over the years, maybe not. but i wold say that using improvements in hardware to justify lower performance in software is lazy at best, the dark side at worst (see current vista hardware demands)...
Edited 2008-08-13 19:05 UTC