[lug] minix vs. linux

Zan Lynx zlynx at acm.org
Wed Apr 19 19:07:33 MDT 2006


On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 16:22 -0600, siegfried wrote:
[snip]
> Can someone explain the merits of the microkernel architecture? I
> believe it is supposed to be more stable because system services are
> implemented in seperatate processes which can be restarted?
[snip]
> And the benefit: Windows is more stable! I guess that is why Windows 3.0 was
> not stable: it did not use the micro kernel architecture!
> 
> So in case you did not know it: this explains why windows is so much more
> stable than linux ;)

Windows NT 3.5 quite stable.  Slow, though.  Later versions of NT moved
more things into the core kernel where they would be faster.

Another benefit of micro-kernel architecture is developer understanding
and debugging.  When separate parts of the kernel are memory protected,
developers only have to worry about what they *know* can affect their
code.  A file-system pointer freed but mistakenly kept in a structure
somewhere can never be used to write over the network packets.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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