On: Retirement of Prof. Andy Tanenbaum

[yellowapple]

What's even more amusing about that remark is that - as of MINIX3, at least - MINIX has in fact adopted the NetBSD userland.

[pionar → yellowapple]

He is not talking about the userland, he's talking about the kernel structure, mirco vs. monolithic.

[kjs3 → pionar]

Ya...part of the design goal is that a microkernel as envisioned by AST should be able to able to have interchangeable userlands, including multiple different userlands running at the same time. So in that sense, AST was spot on.

[jacquesm → kjs3]

Oh, and:

- device drivers as processes (so you can actually debug them)

- increased security by isolating various parts of the core OS from each other

- easy scaling from single machine to cluster by message passing

- treating devices as networked resources

- file systems in userspace (which we have now with FUSE)

and so on.

The benefits of microkernels go a lot further than just being able to use multiple userlands.