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Celebrating 20 Years of OpenBSD With Release 5.8 (openbsd.org)
badger.foo writes: 20 years to the day after the OpenBSD source tree was created for the new project, the project has released OpenBSD 5.8, the 38th release on CD-ROM (and 39th via FTP/HTTP). This release comes with four release songs instead of the usual one, and a long list of improvements over the last releases. (Probably a good time to donate to the project, too, even if you don't use it directly, because of all the security improvements that OpenBSD programmers contribute to the world.)
That there's no point in talking about "how Unix works" since Unix has never been consistent unless you're talking about some of the really old AT&T releases. Once there were multiple Unix vendors things started changing all the time. What we're seeing now in the Linux space is no different from what has always been the case.
Agreed 100% that post #50754359's AC is an uninformed blowhard ... however ...
XNU (OSX's kernel) does have a bunch of Mach-based code running in it, and it is being "used"; in fact it is performing critical functions:
Preemptive multitasking and multithreading
Memory protection
Virtual memory management
Inter-process communication
Interrupt management
Real-time support
Kernel debugging support
Console I/O
There is also a bunch of FreeBSD-based code running in XNU, implementing essentially all the other kernel functions, including POSIX support, filesystems
Is XNU microkernel-based? That's one for the semanticists to debate. Arguably the Mach-based code is not performing microkernel functions. What is not debatable is that there are or have been Unix-"alike" OS'es baed on microkernels. Minix is one. Hurd is another. They are as Unix-alike as Linux is. I would say POSIX defines Unix-ness, and there is absolutely nothing to prevent a microkernel from implementing POSIX just as fully and faithfully as a monolithic kernel.