[ILUG] It's illegal, according to the barrister in PC World

[Smelly Pooh]

In reply to Rick Moen's flatulent wordings, 
> Quoting Smelly Pooh (plop at redbrick.dcu.ie):
> 
> > This isn't a a feature of microkernels.  Large, well-funded, mainstream
> > monolithic kernel projects such as MULTICS have been known to fail also.
> 
> Apples, meet oranges:  Multics flopped for reasons having nothing to do
> with the kernel architecture.  One big one was a lasting shortage of
> decent development tools.  Another was that many of the hardware
> platforms it ran on were badly flawed in various ways.

And yet another was that they tried to implement too much (a lot of it
being in kernel), had big delays, didn't have all the features they
promised, and came out buggy.

*snip*

I concede on the bastardisation of the underlying microkernel in Darwin

> And, even after all that, its perfornace still sucks compared to its
> *BSD brethren's.

Microkernels were always (in theory) going to be weaker on performance,
but since microkernels like QNX could deliver good performance I imagine
the problem lies more with Darwin's implementation (or that of Mach)

> > What exactly do microkernel architectures have to do before they're
> > not failures?
> 
> For starters, get written so that they work and perform well.

Well that's the advantage/disadvantage of microkernels isn't it?  That
they're designed so that operating system behaviour can be added as
servers, so that it's easy to reuse the same microkernel, and now you
see most microkernel based OSs reusing the same microkernel (that being
MACH).

> One infers that the success of the BeOS and QNX kernel developers in
> this area (regardless of commercial scale) are testimony to their
> sheer determination to make a difficult model work.

That's speculative... or  do you have references I can look at?

> If you're proposing to write one, good luck to you.

If you propose to write any OS good luck to you