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usamoi | 7 months ago

Well, it is clear that they have a new definition of a microkernel, since there are now more new technologies that achieve isolation without compromising performance. Microkernel vs monolithic kernel is more of a marketing rhetoric than technical differences.

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kllrnohj|7 months ago

> Microkernel vs monolithic kernel is more of a marketing rhetoric than technical differences.

It's not, they have meanings and they can't just make up something different and pretend it's a microkernel when it isn't. That doesn't make it bad, it's just not what they are claiming. It also obviously isn't IPC, despite their continued use of the term throughout.

Also their isolation says it's ARM Watchpoint which is a debugger support? Maybe they are trapping unexpected address writes, but that isn't doing much for restricting privileges. It also lists Intel PKS, which Linux already supports/uses as well...

StopDisinfo910|7 months ago

You can read the slide deck and the paper. They are pretty transparent about what they do. The whole point is how they tried to adapt microkernel concepts while still retaining the required performance.

They address at length why they don't use a traditional IPC for the most sollicited part of the kernel.

It being or not being a microkernel is not in itself a very interesting take. What's interesting is how useful or not what they do is.