Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sun, 23 Jun 2002 17:41:03 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sun, 23 Jun 2002 17:41:02 -0400 Received: from AMontpellier-205-1-4-20.abo.wanadoo.fr ([217.128.205.20]:50630 "EHLO awak") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id convert rfc822-to-8bit; Sun, 23 Jun 2002 17:41:01 -0400 Subject: [OT] Re: Linux, the microkernel (was Re: latest linus-2.5 BK broken) From: Xavier Bestel To: Alan Cox Cc: Rob Landley , Jeff Garzik , Larry McVoy , "Eric W. Biederman" , Linus Torvalds , Cort Dougan , Benjamin LaHaise , Rusty Russell , Robert Love , Linux Kernel Mailing List In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.7 Date: 23 Jun 2002 23:40:14 +0200 Message-Id: <1024868414.1097.38.camel@bip> Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1318 Lines: 27 Le sam 22/06/2002 ? 17:31, Alan Cox a ?crit : > > A microkernel design was actually made to work once, with good performance. > > It was about fifteen years ago, in the amiga. Know how they pulled it off? > > Commodore used a mutant ultra-cheap 68030 that had -NO- memory management > > unit. > > Vanilla 68000 actually. And it never worked well - the UI folks had > to use a library not threads. The fs performance sucked IIRC all simple UI things were done int the "input task" context (the task moving the mouse pointer, to simplify things) and more heavy duty had to be offloaded to the right task - using message passing of course. This was not the intended design, which was to make Intuition a real device (in the amiga sense, i.e. it could have its own task), but you know, AmigaOS was a commercial proprietary OS with deadlines and a complex history. That's why it had a really sucky fs, too (put your floppy in the drive, type dir, drink a coffee while listening to your disk being eaten, see the command output one-line-by-second). Xav - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/