Hi,

Jensen, Gerard wrote:

Has anyone tried GNU-Mach and GNU-Hurd?

At a version level of 0.2?
A pitty ;-)

NT is microkernel too, in my understanding it's a little advantage over Linux at this moment (?).

Woah, hang on: NT uses a modified microkernel. Process Manager and Virtual
Memory Manager for example are not seperate processes (as they should be in
a "true" microkernel architecture) and communicate using function calls
instead of messages.
Is this that you describe happening under the mask of the DLL calling stuff?
In my understanding, calling a DLL involves that the system is loading the module (if absent) then applying the relocations.
I seem to recall that KERNEL.DLL simply calls a series of funtions on certain interrupt (whose number I can't remember) (protected mode, of course), which I seem to recall it's (part of /the whole of) NTKRNL.
Is this the module that you mean, having both PM and VMM?

Advantage: better performance (pretty relative value if you look at NT
though...). Disadvantages: when last did you have your blue screen of death?
Ages....
To be honest, with XP the PC has only hang twice, in both cases running a DOS app in full screen mode. I noticed that the system wasn't really hung, but I just couldn't switch to the API (nor Winkey neither Ctrl+Alt+Del worked).

There you
go. Shouldn't happen if it really was a microkernel...

Actually I am impressed of its stability, comparable with the most recent versions of Linux (or am I mislead?). Nothing to do with Win98, for example. Even networking with NetBEUI, that with Win98 was a nightmare, seems to work ok...

NT showcases that while the microkernel architecture sounds good with its
modularised design, overhead leads to a lack of performace, so in all
practical ways you probably are not exactly going conform to the microkernel
architecture.

And as that introduces back the problems you wanted to avoid, question is
how far you will get with a pure microkernel architecture for your OS?

Look at it this way: although Hurd has been developed since 1983, we are at
a yet not very usefull version 0.2 now. Linux is being worked on since 1991
in comparison...

To me this looks as if the microkernel architecture is an idealistic dream
that just lacks that knack of practicality. But you're right, it *WOULD* be
cool, if it'd work fast enough to be practical.

Well, I hope there are intermediate solutions ;-)
When I first installed Linux, X server didn't work (as usual, it never works well for me), imagine when someone told me I had to "recompile the OS kernel" !!!

I like DOS despite its limitations. Some say that DOS is monolothic, but I can't understand this, bearing in mind that there are loadable device drivers, and many other stuff that is "plugged" by hooking interrups. I tend to consider that Interrupt/Functions is the "message passing system" of the realmode.
The modularity could be proved perhaps by looking at what VMM did, it can replace some modules (even file management, with VFAT/VREDIR/VCACHE/etc) with some others...

Aitor

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