The Great Microkernel Debate Continues

ficken writes "The great conversation about micro vs. monolithic kernel is still alive and well. Andy Tanenbaum weighs in with another article about the virtues of microkernels. From the article: '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 and then make postings like "I tried an OS based on a microkernel and I observed X, Y, and Z first hand." Has a lot more credibility.'"

Comments

Re:Tag this article...

[vtscott]

And the date at the bottom of the article is "12 May 2006". The same article has been linked from slashdot before too. We really haven't argued about this for a while...

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

QNX. www.qnx.com. Best OS ever. Very long life support (qnx 4.x last patch was issued 17yrs after it was released). Now it is free for non-commercial use, with source.

Linux microkernal ...

[trolltalk.com]

Geez, nobody gets the joke?

If you read the article, Tannenbaum reminds everyone of how Microsoft paid Ken Brown to write a book accusing Linus of stealing the Minix microkernel. FTFA:

In the unlikely event that anyone missed it, a couple of years ago Microsoft paid a guy named Ken Brown to write a book saying Linus stole Linux from my MINIX 1 system. I refuted that accusation pretty strongly to clear Linus' good name. I may not entirely agree with the Linux design, but Linux is his baby, not my baby, and I was pretty unhappy when Brown said he plagiarized it from me.

Re:Which one?

[e4g4]

OS X, strictly speaking, is a hybrid kernel. Essentially, NeXT mashed together Carnegie Mellon's microkernel Mach with BSD (a monolithic kernel) - yielding the overwhelmingly originally named XNU kernel. (X is Not Unix). So in short - yes , OS X is a microkernel based OS, but is just as much a monolithic kernel based OS.

Re:Microkernels are the future

[AKAImBatman]

Depends. Ever hear of FUSE? It's been showing up in quite a few distros for the capabilities it buys by running outside of kernel space. It's become so important, that it has been ported to BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

What does it do? Why, it's a monolithic driver that provides an interface to support userspace filesystem drivers. i.e. A microkernel in practice, if not in definition. Ergo, the grandparent's point about a slow migration.