Re:Fuchsia Workstation
by torginus on Monday March 28, 2022 @02:59AM
(#30827879)
Generally speaking the hybrid microkernel is the architecture both macOS and Windows went width, where some drivers still run in ring 0, but have some level of isolation between the core OS stuff, and driver stuff.
For example, this allows Windows to restart a crashed GPU driver.
Windows (and I think macOS as well) also has a stable kernel ABI/API for drivers, a fact that's probably appreciated by the hardware vendors.
The bad name attached to microkernels I think stems from the debate between Tanenbaum and Linus in the 90s, where Tanenbaum's microkernel was sorely lacking in performance, mostly owning to the incredibly resource intensive context switches on the CPUs of the time.
However, on newer CPUs, this cost is much less significant as CPUs are better optimized for this, making it worthwhile to revisit this issue.
For example, this allows Windows to restart a crashed GPU driver.
Windows (and I think macOS as well) also has a stable kernel ABI/API for drivers, a fact that's probably appreciated by the hardware vendors.
The bad name attached to microkernels I think stems from the debate between Tanenbaum and Linus in the 90s, where Tanenbaum's microkernel was sorely lacking in performance, mostly owning to the incredibly resource intensive context switches on the CPUs of the time.
However, on newer CPUs, this cost is much less significant as CPUs are better optimized for this, making it worthwhile to revisit this issue.