Re: How much of microkernel?

[Petr Janda <elekktretterr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks, that answers my question pretty well!

Petr

Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :
> :Hi Matt,
> :I've always been a fan of microkernel design and I would like to know 
> :how much towards microkernel design do you have plans to go with 
> :DragonFly? I know you will be incorporating VFS into userland which is 
> :normally a feature of a microkernel, but where do you wanna go after 
> :that, in regards to microkernelizing DragonFly? Drivers? TCP/IP? other 
> :subsystems?
> :
> :Cheers and good luck programming! :)
> :
> :Petr
>
>     Well, DragonFly is definitely not a microkernel.  We forked off of
>     FreeBSD, after all, and that is a fairly monolithic kernel.  I like
>     the microkernel concept but putting core elements of an operating
>     system into their own protection boxes result in fairly significant
>     performance issues.
>
>     That said, in order to reach our clustering goals we will have to
>     be able to operate most major kernel operations, such as devices and
>     filesystems, over a communications protocol as well as natively.  This
>     infrastructure will make it possible to implement devices and filesystems
>     as user processes and thus become more microkernel-like.
>
>     Personally I think that non-performance-oriented devices really should
>     be run from their own sandboxes.  There is no real need to have
>     msdosfs built into the kernel, for example.  But devices for which
>     performance is important probably ought to stay in the kernel.
>
> 					-Matt
> 					Matthew Dillon 
> 					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>
>