Re:GNU/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (...
by yencabulator on Monday August 14, 2023 @02:17PM
(#37124517)
1. Read up on the seL4 microkernel. It pretty much destroyed the "microkernels are too slow" argument.
2. Modern day hardware is mostly just ringbuffers mapped to memory. There's a real convergence of hardware interfaces, virtio, and io_uring into all being this very similar looking thing. With IOMMUs, moving drivers to userspace is pretty attractive. There's not much of a difference between a cloud VM getting access to a VFIO device from the hypervisor and a userspace device driver getting access to hardware from the microkernel. And there's a lot of money in making cloud VM networking & storage faster.
2. Modern day hardware is mostly just ringbuffers mapped to memory. There's a real convergence of hardware interfaces, virtio, and io_uring into all being this very similar looking thing. With IOMMUs, moving drivers to userspace is pretty attractive. There's not much of a difference between a cloud VM getting access to a VFIO device from the hypervisor and a userspace device driver getting access to hardware from the microkernel. And there's a lot of money in making cloud VM networking & storage faster.