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Torvalds on the Microkernel Debate
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has chimed in on the recently flamed-up (again) micro vs monolithic kernel, but this time with an interesting and unexpected point of view. From the article: 'The real issue, and it's really fundamental, is the issue of sharing address spaces. Nothing else really matters. Everything else ends up flowing from that fundamental question: do you share the address space with the caller or put in slightly different terms: can the callee look at and change the callers state as if it were its own (and the other way around)?'"
The whole discussion of micro-kernel vs monolithic kernel is totally pointless. All popular OS kernels are monolithic. We can get back to the debate when we have a working fast microkernel in the market that is actually competitive.
Linus is a pragmatist. He didn't write Linux for academic purpose. He wanted it to work.
But you can always prove him wrong by showing him the code, and I bet he'd be glad to accept he was wrong.
"The whole "microkernels are simpler" argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel,the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too. He goes on to say, "It's ludicrous how microkernel proponents claim that their system is "simpler" than a traditional kernel. It's not. It's much much more complicated, exactly because of the barriers that it has raised between data structures." He states that the most fundamental issue is the sharing of address spaces. "Nothing else really matters. Everything else ends up flowing from that fundamental question: do you share the address space with the caller, or put in slightly different terms: can the callee look at and change the callers state as if it were its own?"
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
I think Linus hit the spot by pointing out that the future of home computing is going to to focus on parallel processing - it's 2006 and all my computers, including my LAPTOP, are dual-processor systems.
By 2010 I suspect at least desktops are 4-CPU systems and as the numbers of cores increase one of the large drawbacks of microkernels raises it's ugly head: microkernels turn simple locking algorithms into distributed computing-style algorithms.
Every game developer tells us how difficult it is to write multi-threaded code for even our monolithic operating systems (Windows, Linux, OSX). In microkernels you constantly have to worry how to share data with other threads as you can't trust them to give even correct pointers! If you would explicitly trust them, then a single failure at any driver or module would bring down the whole system - just like in monolithic kernels but with a performance penalty that scales nicely with the number of cores. What's even worse is that at a multi-core environment you'll have to be very, very careful when designing and implementing the distribution algorithms or a simple user-space program could easily crash the system or gain superuser privileges.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
By today's standards, Mach is not much of a microkernel. Mach has been disowned by microkernel proponents because it was so big and nasty.
MacOS has that sharing address space with the monolithic BSD kernel. So a semi-microkernel and a monolithic kernel are firmly bolted together. That's only a microkernel if your degree is in marketing.
You are forgiven for being wrong, but not for spouting off nonsense despite knowing that you don't know what you're talking about, apparently applying the principal "if my argument involves M$ doing the wrong thing, it must be right".
While neither NT nor Mac OS X are true microkernels, the architecture of both is strongly inspired by microkernel ideas. Like Linus, the developers of these kernels recognized the practical difficulties involved in making full-on microkernels work, but unlike Linus, instead of throwing in the towel completely and doing full-on monolithic kernels, they created cleanly seperated layers interacting via well-defined interfaces whenever they practically could.
If you talk to kernel programmers, most will express a high degree of respect for the NT kernel, which is based on the DEC VMS kernel. It mostly the poor design of systems that sit on top of the kernel that has earned Windows its reputation.
abstraction and state isolation considered harmful
Name: Linus Torvalds (torvalds AT osdl.org) 5/9/06
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_Arthur (Arthur_ AT sympatico.ca) on 5/9/06 wrote:
I found that distinction between microkernels and "monolithic" kernels useful: With microkernels, when you call a system service, a "message" is generated to be handled by the kernel *task*, to be dispatched to the proper handler (task). There is likely to be at least 2 levels of task-switching (and ring-level switching) in a microkernel call.
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I don't think you should focus on implementation details.
For example, the task-switching could be basically hidden by hardware, and a "ukernel task switch" is not necessarily the same as a traditional task switch, because you may have things - hardware or software conventions - that basically might turn it into something that acts more like a normal subroutine call.
To make a stupid analogy: a function call is certainly "more expensive" than a straight jump (because the function call implies the setup for returning, and the return itself). But you can optimize certain function calls into plain jumps - and it's such a common optimization that it has a name of its own ("tailcall conversion").
In a similar manner, those task switches for the system call have very specific semantics, so it's possible to do them as less than "real" task-switches.
So I wouldn't focus on them, since they aren't necessarily even the biggest performance problem of an ukernel.
The real issue, and it's really fundamental, is the issue of sharing address spaces. Nothing else really matters. Everything else ends up flowing from that fundamental question: do you share the address space with the caller, or put in slightly different terms: can the callee look at and change the callers state as if it were its own (and the other way around)?
Even for a monolithic kernel, the answer is a very emphatic no when you cross from user space into kernel space. Obviously the user space program cannot change kernel state, but it is equally true that the kernel cannot just consider user space to be equivalent to its own data structures (it might use the exact same physical instructions, but it cannot trust the user pointers, which means that in practice, they are totally different things from kernel pointers).
That's another example of where "implementation" doesn't much matter, this time in the reverse sense. When a kernel accesses user space, the actual implementation of that - depending on hw concepts and implementation - may be exactly the same as when it accesses its own data structures: a normal "load" or "store". But despite that identical low-level implementation, there are high-level issues that radically differ.
And that separation of "access space" is a really big deal. I say "access space", because it really is something conceptually different from "address space". The two parts may even "share" the address space (in a monolithic kernel they normally do), and that has huge advantages (no TLB issues etc), but there are issues that means that you end up having protection differences or simply semantic differences between the accesses.
(Where one common example of "semantic" difference might be that one "access space" might take a page fault, while another one is guaranteed to be pinned down - this has some really huge issues for locking around the access, and for dead-lock avoidance etc etc).
So in a traditional kernel, you usually would share the address space, but you'd have protection issues and some semantic differences that mean that the kernel and user space can't access each other freely. And that makes for some really big issues, but a traditional kernel very much tries to minimize them. And most importantly, a traditional kernel shares the access space across all the basic system calls, so that user/kernel difference is the only access space boundary.
Now, the real problem with split acce
Sort of. In the scanerio you describe, the program was, in fact, not proved to be correct because the people who did the proof failed to take into account the real requirements for the system.
If you don't even know your requirements, no methodology to implement those requirements is going to work reliably.
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Distributed algorithms are of course difficult to implement with a f***ed up language like C.
Here, it seems, the means justify the ends. Linus basically says "I won't take any challenges".
Linus tells me that we can never write a proper scalable OS for a NUMA machine, or a modular system that can serve well to parallel I/O systems and the like. I highly disagree.
Because these things are not pipe dreams, they have been done. IBM guys have made amazingly abstract and modular OS stuff and they've been using them for years, so I think it's rather pathetic to say that there is only one true path to OS implementation. Why not admit that it is the only path that you have any experience in?
--exa--
Tovarisch Gorshkov, to prove that the program is correct ("covert channel analysis" and such.) might take up to a year and that is only if there are less than 10k lines of code and no more, but that doesn't mean that the program will _run_ slow. The time and methods used to prove correctness don't necessarily say anything about the speed of the program during runtime.
..... but then again, neither did I. Just as some algorythms are faster than others O(n) vs O(log n), etc, some designs are inherently slower than others. And what is a kernel, if not the expression of an (albiet complex) algorythm to accomplish a task (provide system services)?
..... but it's slow by design. There is only so much you can do to speed it up - the limitations are inherent in the message passing mechanisms.
.... and "I haven't bothered proving the sucker" doesn't mean crash and burn.
.... and no easier to do so with with Minix, or BeOS, or any other microkernel.
You're right, it *doesn't* say anything about the code efficiency, or the runtime per se
The microkernel may be more elegant, more pristine in the lab
I'm sorry, I'm with Linux on this one.
Provably correct doesn't mean "good"
Also, there is nothing about a microkernel that makes it more inherently provably correct than a monolithic kernel. Even going back to Parnas' notation that we used years ago, and thinking about the structure of the Linux kernel, it would be pretty easy to go through the exercise and prove it correct/incorrect
The analogy of centralisation vs. local autonomy is not totally accurate either. Both the monolithic and the microkernel are centralized, except that in the first case there a large beaurocratic structure and in the second case it just a dictator and a couple of "advisors". If the dictator or the king is chosen well, the system will be more predictable and will work much better. If case of the large beaurocratic system, if some of its members get corrupted [and they will because there are so many of them] the whole system will fail. It is like saying that a small bug in the mouse driver will freeze and crash the system with a monolithic kernel. Good thing if the system was only running Doom at the time and not controlling a reactor, or administering a drug. If the same happens in the microkernel system, the kernel will reload the driver, raise an alarm, or in general -- be able to take the system to a predictable predetermined state. Going back to the analogy is it is like having the dictator execute a corrupted staff member and replace him immediately.
Andy likes microkernels because they force you to do that. Time spent on design leads to insight, which may well point to better and cleaner ways to do the task you originally set out to acomplish.
Linus hates microkernels because they force you to do that. Time spent on design is time lost getting working code out the door, and working code will give you experience that will point to better and cleaner ways to do the task you originally set out to acomplish.
Individual pieces aren't really any simpler either. In fact, if you want your kernel to scale, to work well with lots of processes, you are going to run into a simple problem: multitasking.
This is very true.
Consider a filesystem driver in a monolithic kernel. If a dozen or so processes are all doing filesystem calls, then, assuming proper locking and in-kernel pre-emption, there's no problem - each process that executes the call enters kernel mode and starts executing the relevant kernel code immediately.
OK, here's where things start getting a little tricky. The whole locking setup in a monolithic kernel is pretty tricky. Early multi-processor kernels often took the course of "one big lock" at the top of the call stack - essentially only one process could be executing in the kernel. Why? Because all that "proper locking" is tricky. Took years to get this working right. Of course it's done now in Linux so you can take advantage of it, but it wasn't easy.
Now consider a microkernel. The filesystem driver is a separate server process. Executing a system call means sending a message to that server and waiting for an answer.
OK, now here, you're kind of running off the rails. What is a "message"? There is no magical processor construct called a "message" - it's something that the OS provides. How messages are implemented can vary quite a bit. What you're thinking of is a messaging system ala sockets - that is the message would be placed onto a queue and then a process switch would happen sometime and the server on the other end would read messages out of the queue and do something. That's how microkernels are usually presented conceptually so it tends to get stuck in peoples' heads.
However, messages can be implemented in other ways. For example, you could make a message be more like a procedure call - you create a new stack, swap your address table around, and then jump into the function in the "server". No need to instantiate threads in the "server" anymore than there is a need to instantiate threads within a monolithic kernel. The server would essentially share the thread of the caller. I've worked on microkernel architectures that were implemented just this way.
If the number of data structures that you can directly access is smaller, the amount of locking that you have to take into account is smaller. Modularity and protection makes most people's tasks easier.
Many of the arguments made for monolithic kernels are similar to the arguments you used to hear from Mac programmers who didn't want to admit that protected memory and multi-tasking were good things. Mac programmers liked to (as I used to say) "look in each other's underware". Programs rummaged about through system data structures and other apps data structures sometimes, changing things where they felt like it. This can be pretty fun sometimes and you can do some really spiffy things. However, set one byte the wrong way and the whole system comes crashing down.
But in practice Linux 2.6 is 6 million lines of code and a typical microkernel is less than 10k.
Umm, doesn't that mean while you've prooved that the 10k microkernel lines correct, you'd still have ~6 million lines of code sitting outside the microkernal waiting to be prooved? I can't see how a microkernel can magically do with 10k everything Linux is doing with 6 million lines (especially as by the definition of microkernel, than there's no way it could).
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
You don't have to prove it, as long as the microkernel will be able to put the system into a predetermined state, it could for example unload the driver and try another one or just try to relaod it, it could contact you via a pager and so on. As opposed to the whole system freezing because some idiot wrote if(a=1) instead of if(a==1) in the mouse driver. You can only hope that the system that froze was running Doom and Firefox and wasn't flying planes, or administering drugs.
That's interesting because those are exactly my thoughts every time I hear the arguments people use to defend microkernels: Java is to microkernels as C/C++ is to monolithic kernels.
Linus Torvalds summed it well when he mentioned that microkernels are simpler only when data flow goes in one direction only. It's very hard to get a function to fill a complicated data structure for you if you cannot work with pointers. Passing a reference will do only for simple structures, it will not work if there are structures within structures, it is very hard to do if the called function must itself pass some subset of that structure to another function. And for operating systems where one must contend with multiple access and locking, it's almost impossible to do without a performance penalty.
Let's face it: pointer manipulation is necessary because there are real life problems that are more complex than textbook examples. If there weren't, inventing the C language wouldn't have been necessary, we could have stuck with Fortran all along.
Well maybe that's how *you* would design *your* Microkernel. And yes, it would suck.
The way I would design the filesystem driver, would be to accept a request, add it to a queue of pending requests to serve. If there are no initiated requests, find the request that can most efficiently be served based upon your preferred policy (closest seek time, for example, or first come first serve, your choice), and initiate that request. Add some smarts for multiple devices, so multiple requests can be initiated at the same time to different devices. When data comes back, answer the requesting process with their data. Rather than sitting around blocking on a request, go grab more requests from other processes and queue them up. No need to block. When an initiated request comes back, send back the data to the requesting process, and everyone's happy. Just because things are separated out into different processes, doesn't mean that they can't do some asynchronous juggling to be efficient. Add multi-threading, and the coding becomes a bit easier; but multi-threading isn't necessary to rely upon to have this work well.
I'm pretty sure the monolithic kernels do things somewhat similarly; build a request queue, service that queue. They could also block until they're done other requests, but that would be bad design. Don't assume a Microkernel Filesystem server has to suffer from similarly bad design.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Proving the correctness of the core of the microkernel may be feasible, but I doubt it is even remotely possible for the "OS".
When there are hundreds of device drivers, each interacting with each other, and the fact that a lot of hardware out there have their own set of flaws and sometimes produce unpredictable behavior, the best bet would be to write code that is "as correct as you know it", and then test test and test.
Of course, on niche systems where the hardware can be controlled, proving it may be possible, but still if we're talking about mainstream OS'es like linux, the approach just wouldn't work.
The problem is that it doesn't match the way most people work right now.
Check out this brilliant paper by Alistair Cockburn (spoken as Co-burn) - Characterizing People as Non-Linear, First-Order Components in Software Development. Over and over in this paper he says:
- Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.
- Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway.
Alistair comes to an equally brilliant conclusion: In short, without Linus, microkernels may help. With Linus, a monolithic kernel works fine.If you've ever worked on a software project with more than four people, didn't the personality and skills of the people involved make more of a difference than any methodology, abstraction, or even the language used? That's always been true in my experience.
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When people go and by a new computer, many are willing to spend hundreds of dollars more to get a little extra performance. They will not like to have that taking away from them just so that they can run a microkernel.
Agreed, but these are the same people who don't really care if they're at the bleeding edge of technology and have to deal with super-l33t video driver 0.8.2b crashing every so often.
It is just a false premise, just because some monolithic (or hybrid) kernels are unreliable does not mean that it is necessary or better to use microkernels to get reliability.
I'm afraid the false assumption has fallen upon you here. It's proven, time and again, that microkernels make it simpler to guarantee security and reliability. Yes, microkernels hurt performance a bit. However, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater to discard microkernel architecture because of performance. By discarding microkernel architecture, you also discard the architectural segregation of system services, which makes for a very simple way to segragate effort when you've got say, an open-source project with developers located around the globe. Microkernels also ease maintenance, again, because the kernel remains small.
A HUGE misstep that the monolithic kernel camp has made by pointing fingers at microkernels' performance is this: smart coders write good, clean, testable, reliable, secure programs first, and optimize later. One should never, EVER attempt to optimize code on the first pass. Write it, test it, fix it, THEN optimize it. Leave the clearly non-optimal code in during the first few passes, just for the sake of maintenance. Then, you'll have a good, clean codebase from which to begin profiling and optimizing.
I can personally testify to spending exorbitant amounts of time debugging architecturally un-sound code, written intentionally so, because a wise architectural decision would've resulted in lesser performance. Out of curiosity, I usually run profilers over this code. Most often, these architectural decisions result in such a negligible performance increase that it pales in comparison to the maintenance nightmare that ensues from it.
There's nothing magical about microkernels that prevents them from being optimized, just like any other program. The benefits of the microkernel architecture certainly outweigh the performance hit in my book.
I recommend sodium chloride (5mg) if you disagree with any of the above.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
Sooooo, it's easy to have someone else handle the multi-process bits in a monolithic design. But when it comes to writing services for microkernels suddenly everyone is an idiot? I don't think that was what was meant. Thing is, with a monolithic kernel every process can run in userspace or in kernel space. (OK, I'm assuming a 1:1 kernel threads to user threads, but lets ignore that issue for now) Because all the processes have a kernel context, it's quite simple to manage multiple processes making use of the kernel at once. Run kernel code to service the filesystem request in the kernel-mode context of the process that made the request. At this point, if the kernel supports pre-emption then it's possible to pre-empt that process during kernel-mode execution and resume it later. In a microkernel you don't get that. The filesystem server doesn't implicitly get its multithreading from each process being represented by a kernel thread - because it can't access the kernel. If it wants an implementation of multithreading it has to implement its own (nb. could use a library to simplify this). But lots of tasks now require explicit extra code: the FS server might need to handle scheduling priorities itself, because the internals of the server aren't under direct control of the kernel; threading in the FS server must be made explicit because it doesn't come "for free" when processes are created. This is a problem for every server that needs to serve multiple clients simultaneously. A lot of this should be solvable with library code, I have thought. But the basic argument here (AFAIK) is that you have to code up somewhere in userspace extra implementations to take care of things that are implicitly provided for in a monolithic design.
What you're talking about is very close to CPS.
There are some ways to convert normal function calls to CPS.
And there is something called monads used to convert imperative algorithms to functional style.
And yes, continuations can be a very powerful technique.
However, CPS functional code is still coding an algorithm. Any way to compute something is an algorithm. May be you should name your critic "I dislike imperative algorithms, and I like CPS functional algorithms."
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
IBM is shipping it. Novell, RedHat, WindRiver, LinuxWorks, Motorola, Sharp, Sony, Hell even I'm shipping it in embedded products. It is easy to "prove it works" as alluded to in another post.
Microkernels are also shipping from QNX and, uh and, oh I'm sure there are a few more. (Not knocking QNX, considered it but tossed it, due to cost and liscensing.)
Is one more secure or stable than another, is really the wrong question.
The question is really is the "System" designed with microkernel more or less stable or secure or functional then the alternative.
I think it has, to my satisfaction, been settled. From RevolutionOS the movie (BuyIt!) Stallman is asked why HURD is so far behind Linux. His answer, (paraphrased, sorry RMS) Turns out a microkernel is very difficult to pull off because of the constant stream of messages required for the simplest of tasks. This forced ovehead only makes the Kernel more secure not the system, if the "drivers" keep crashing out and restarting you could go months without noticing critical flaws. "But the kernel is rock solid" doesn't really help if I can't ship the "System", does it. The only evidence you need, is the development pace of Hurd or even QNX to show this.
I respect the professor and his work, but it was an inspiration for a much more scalable design that clearly is superior for the rapid development a modern OS is expected to have.
As an engineer I see the beauty, but as a Production Engineer I can also see the added complexity a microkernel brings.
Of course you could, argue theoretically that I'm wrong or prove it by making a GNU/Minix distribution to compete in the real world with Linux. Almost 15yrs and a flood of Students haven't helped Professor T, produce it yet. Admittedly not his goal, but come on I know students and CompSci students have a knack for carrying their favorite teacher/classes with them throughout their career and it shows up in their projects.
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So, did VMS have a graphics subsystem in the kernel as well?
No. In NT 3.1, the graphics subsystem ran in user-space. In NT 4.0, it was moved into kernel-mode to avoid the performance hit of the context switch. As this history suggests, the actual architectures of the executive and the graphics subsystem are not tightly coupled. They share an address space for performance reasons, not in order to share state. (To be clear, I don't think this is a great thing, and it is a violation of microkernel principals. But the programmers made the smallest possible departure from microkernel principals to achieve their performance requirement.)
I find it highly amusing that many of the same people who defend the monolithic Linux kernel architecture that tightly couples so many subsystems to the kernel also attack Windows for running the graphics subsystem in kernel mode.