* Posts by Vomlehn

1 publicly visible post • joined 16 Feb 2024

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Vomlehn

The *three* things that make a microkernel.

The article makes the claim that two things make a microkernel: scheduling and memory management. It then mentions, in a backhanded way, interprocess communication, but this is actually the third and necessary leg of a microkernel. Not only that, but is precisely IPC that builds in the performance edge that monolithic kernels have over microkernel and which have kept microkernels on the periphery. There *are* ways to address this, at some cost in hardware, but this does not appear to be an area of active research.