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Microkernels are IPC-heavy, right? What I rather imagine is having modules at source level, not kernel level. So the thing still compiles down to a monolith/hybrid, but modules are abstracted away and reusable.

Source level modules sound awesome. Would need a high level language though.

Like Rust?

Maybe, I would personally go with C++.

The IPC overhead is very much manageable, microkernels tend to be a lot more responsive than monoliths and with paging for message passing the overhead is reduced even further.

It would be interesting to see if modern multi-core cpus make the possible overhead of microkernels a non-issue today.

Microkernels are much easier to optimize for multi-core CPUs than monoliths. The ´kernel modules´ from a monolith run as user processes in a microkernel environment so they automatically benefit from more cores.

Except that most kernels for high integrity computing or hard real time deployments are microkernels.