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Is that a serious question? <_<


Users really have no idea how immensely complicated kernel development really is.

Is that a serious question? "

Yes, that's a serious question. WTF is a "modern" kernel, and WTF is a "premodern" kernel when the few decades-long history of "modern" computer science reveals a recycling of old ideas "rehashed" as innovative.

Modern, lol. Also spare me the User ad hominem. Been doing this alot longer than you, trust me. That is the whole point of microkernel (no wait, nanokernel!, no wait picokernel!) design.. simplicity and correctness at the cost of performance (to an arguable extent).

Finally, I think you overestimate kernel development effort, probably because you are doing some hobby work in that area yourself? Compare the effort involved in the Linux kernel by any "engineering" metric (man-hours, SLOC) and it pales in comparison to projects in userspace. The hard "work" in operating system delivery is HAL/drivers. Plain and simple. Some people wanna call that kernel development, but we know better.

Take a step back from what you are doing before throwing around black-box terms like "complexity" unless you are prepared to discuss what that actually means because generally speaking the cyclomatic complexity of kernel code is (and should) be signficantly lower. But there aren't even real metrics to talk compare 2 bodies of code now are there? That is how haphazard software engineering is.

wait for the nielistic kenrel

So nihilistic in fact that the developers go the extra mile to mispell both nihilistic and kernel.

Edited 2011-06-21 10:14 UTC

A modern kernel obviously uses some form of distributed microkernel design with Internet and social networking integration.

You see, each time such a computer connects to the internet, it becomes automatically parts of the "hive mind". When someone starts a power-intensive calculation on such a modern OS, like a Blender render, that calculation is distributed across all available nodes, resulting in render times that are pretty close to the latency of the slowest connexion for still HD images.

And because this modern OS is based on a microkernel with AES-encrypted message passing as the main IPC method, security breaches never occur.

(Note : This was a joke, based on my vision of current academia OS design fantasies. You are asked not to take it seriously. Please. Pretty please.)

Edited 2011-06-21 05:41 UTC