For consumer devices, the Blackberry Playbook was one of the better examples given it was built on QNX microkernel for reliability and nobody was complaining about its performance (i.e. doing two games at once). Lots of phones have microkernels in them to isolate baseband from problems in main OS. Did you know you were using a virtualized OS message passing to other components? I didn't either until I saw the vendor's press release. They might be efficient after all. ;)
Here's one used a lot in safety-critical and security-critical apps with nice security architecture:
Note: See their papers and KeyKOS especially, as it was first successful one on IBM mainframes of old.
GenodeOS and MINIX 3 are the best efforts to look at in FOSS today as they're actively maintained. Not at Linux feature set or stability yet given almost no staff haha. Already on bare metal and hosting apps/desktops, though. Just don't think stuff like Hurd is representative of microkernels in general. It's just a failed GNU project. ;)
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/
For consumer devices, the Blackberry Playbook was one of the better examples given it was built on QNX microkernel for reliability and nobody was complaining about its performance (i.e. doing two games at once). Lots of phones have microkernels in them to isolate baseband from problems in main OS. Did you know you were using a virtualized OS message passing to other components? I didn't either until I saw the vendor's press release. They might be efficient after all. ;)
Here's one used a lot in safety-critical and security-critical apps with nice security architecture:
http://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity.html
The beautiful and efficient MorphOS uses a microkernel:
http://www.morphos-team.net/intro
One that was made for capability-security model with FOSS code:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070428020436/http://www.eros-o...
Note: See their papers and KeyKOS especially, as it was first successful one on IBM mainframes of old.
GenodeOS and MINIX 3 are the best efforts to look at in FOSS today as they're actively maintained. Not at Linux feature set or stability yet given almost no staff haha. Already on bare metal and hosting apps/desktops, though. Just don't think stuff like Hurd is representative of microkernels in general. It's just a failed GNU project. ;)