On 13 May 2010, at 23:33, Jan-Paul Bultmann wrote: > Very insightful, I never considered Symbian OS, seems truly nice designed > even though putting drivers into a "microkernel" makes me shiver a bit :D
Way off topic here.. but: EXA2 has a nanokernel, which serves the same purpose as the HAL in the NT kernel. This handles the core services and can't even do memory allocation. Although drivers are running in the kernel, they are usually quite simple. Most Symbian drivers, for example, do not handle multiplexing. A single userspace process has exclusive access to the device, and other processes use the nice authenticated message passing IPC mechanism to access it. I had an article published on this kernel a couple of weeks ago: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1578523 If you're really interested, there's a great book about the design available for free online: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian_OS_Internals David -- Sent from my Apple II _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
