ORLY.
Do explain how you can have micro kernel features on Linux. Explain, please, how I can kill the filesystem module and restart it when it bugs out, and how I can prevent hard kernel crashes when a bug in a kernel module causes a lock-up. Iβm really interested in hearing how I can upgrade a kernel module with a patch without forcing a reboot; thatβd really help on Arch, where minor, patch-level kernel updates force reboots multiple times a week (without locking me into an -lts kernel that isnβt getting security patches).
Iβd love to hear how monolithic kernels have solved these.
I thought the point of lts kernels is they still get patches despite being old.
Other than that though youβre right on the money. I think they donβt know what the characteristics of a microkernel are. I think they mean that a microkernel canβt have all the features of a monolithic kernel, what they fail to realise is that might actually be a good thing.
I thought the point of lts kernels is they still get patches despite being old.
Well, yeah, youβre right. My shameful admission is that Iβm not using LTS because I wanted to play with bcachefs and itβs not in LTS. Maybe thereβs a package for LTS now thatβd let me at it, but, still. Itβs a bad excuse, but there you go.
I think a lot of people also donβt realize that most of the performance issues have been worked around, and if RedoxOS is paying attention to advances in the microkernel field and is not trying to solve every problem in isolation, they could end up with close to monolithic kernel performance. Certainly close to Windows performance, and that seems good enough for Industry.
I donβt think microkernels will ever compete in the HPC field, but I highly doubt anyone complaining about the performance penalty of microkernel architecture would actual notice a difference.
Windows is a hybrid kernel, and has some interesting layers of abstraction, all of which make it slower. Itβs also full of junkware these days. So beating it shouldnβt be that hard.
Yeah to be fair in HPC itβs probably easier to just setup a watchdog and reboot that node in case of issues. No need for the extra resilience.
you donβt need a micro kernel to install medules, nor to make a crash in certain module donβt bring the kernel down, you program it isolated, they donβt do that now because itβs unecessary, but android do that, and thereβs work being doing in that way https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Scheduler-Micro
the thing is that itβs harder todo that, thatβs why no one does, but not impossible, you also need to give the kernel the foundation to support that
Fun fact: Androidβs next Kernel, Fuchsia, is a microkernel. So even Google acknowledges the superiority of microkernels.
