[wplug-bsd] Fw: OT: Beastie makes a cameo appearance on apple.com.

[Jonathan S. Billings]

On Mon, 2004-06-28 at 19:40, Bill Moran wrote:
> I think the problem is that a microkernel is too much effort to develop,
> debug, and maintain, and you really don't gain a lot by using one, unless
> you're a developer.

Actually, I believe that the Mach microkernel API doesn't change very
much, and porting it to a new architecture is probably simpler than
porting a monolithic kernel.  Also, the separation of microkernel from
BSD interface can produce a cleaner upgrade path.  I believe the biggest
problem has always been speed.  IIRC, Mach always suffered from too much
overhead of passing messages between it's subunits.  

(for what it's worth, we used to run an OS called Mach which was a
BSD-like OS with a Mach microkernel, and it ran on several different
platforms, including x86.)
-- 
Jonathan S. Billings <billings at negate.org>