Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

the OSX version of Mach has subsumed so much back into the kernel that it can barely be considered a microkernel any more.

The thing is that for most systems, microkernels are a performance liability, (it's possible to make them perform well, but it's very hard to do while keeping memory protection) and with lots of hardware they tend not to be a big safety win - if you can wedge the hardware through bad commands, it doesn't matter if the commands originated in userspace or kernelspace.




This happened to the Windows NT microkernel too - they just kept shoving more and more stuff back into kernelspace for performance reasons, starting with Graphics drivers in NT4, and going from there. I think they may have yo-yo'd on Graphics Drivers later for stability reasons, but I've taken my eye off Windows since I stopped using it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: