Andy Microbaum
Andy abhors monolithic kernels like Linux, Windows or BSD. He rather writes a carefully designed little kernel that does some basic stuff and leaves the rest for user space.
Pro's & Con's
Pro:
- easier to maintain
Con:
- more overhead
- harder to program
Going further than Andy Microbaum
Consider other kernel designs: Layered, modular or even smaller (nanokernel, exokernel)
Andy Microbaum's bookshelf
Research papers on microkernels
Andy Microbaum's opponents position
Monolithic kernel (= all in one big kernel) Mono Lizzy
See also the famous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate
- Amoeba [1] (a libre distributed OS)
- Mach (the fundament of Hurd)
- QNX is a proprietary 32-bit POSIX OS. Its microkernel design was chosen to allow extreme modularity allowing it to run on extremely tiny hardware. Its GUI was also modular and designed similarly to a microkernel. In the 90s, a demo was made, fitting onto a single 1.4MB floppy disk the OS with window system, GUI web browser and other programs, web server, a virtual file device creating dynamic content for the web server, and network drivers.
- PeterX I'm strongly against a monolithic kernel, so I fall more or less under the microkernel category
- eekee -- I'm planning a microkernel with the goal of making it easy to write new services, even trivial ones. The relative ease of maintaining a microkernel also attracted me, and I'm enjoying the challenge of designing interfaces for minimal overhead.