From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 10:06:29 PST
On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Robert S. Thau wrote:
> Unfortunately, the worst thing about the Minix book is probably Minix
> itself, with its microkernel architecture, which was the academic fad
> at the time it was written, but has fallen out of vogue for some
> pretty good reasons. (It's very hard to write a microkernel which
> doesn't run into performance problems, and Minix in particular has
> bottlenecks like the infamous single-threaded filesystem which you
> need a major overhaul to fix).
Nanokernels are not worthwhile because they're hard to write?
That's hardly a valid reason for a True Programmer(tm). I haven't
heard about performance problems of QNX, and L4/FIASCO is not
doing to shabbily in comparision to RTLinux (ask google).
The advantages of tiny kernels and small contexts are obvious,
as realtime and QoS plus small memory footprint are going to be
needed in the near future. Memory will move into the CPU module,
ultimatively becoming embedded, and we will have multiple CPUs in
a single desktop, with a fast packet switched interconnect.
Monolithic stuff will be a bear to port to such architectures.
Pingpong times of measly 30 us are impossible with message passing
that has to go through the kernel. This is quite unacceptable.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 03 2001 - 10:11:41 PST