Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

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Nintendo don’t publish detailed schematics of their systems to the level that you’re claiming. Not even on their developers portal. (I’ve had developer account with Nintendo since the Wii days).

And with regards to your point about Linux vs micro kernels, it does make a massive difference when you’re talking about hardware like the N64 which wouldn’t want any of those features which micro kernels excel at and which every instruction wasted is going to cost the user experience heavily. This point was made abundantly clear at the start of the conversation as well.

Look, I have nothing against micro kernels. There’s an architectual beauty to them which I really like. It’s the functional programming equivalent of kernel design. But pragmatically it wouldn’t be your silver bullet in the very specific context we were discussing (re N64). And to be honest I’m sick of you pulling these pathetic straw man arguments in every thread you post on.

laumars, I think what I'm missing to hear from you is why microkernels are such a bad and horrible idea and more importantly why Nintendo itself is mistaken if they had used them on their devices. Otherwise, I still think they are a good fit.

They’re not a bad and horrible idea. I never once said that. Micro kernels are, in my opinion, the future of OS development because they offer a bunch of guarantees which are much harder to achieve with a monolithic kernel (like memory safety, stability (eg a segfault in a driver doesn’t bring down the entire kernel) and so on and so forth.

The problem worth micro kernels is that abstraction isn’t free. That’s less of an issue with modern hardware running modern work loads because you’d need to put that memory safety in regardless of the kernel architecture and chips these days are fast enough that the benefits of security and safety far far outweigh the deminishing cost in performance. However on the N64 you don’t need any of the benefits that a micro kernel offers while you do need to preserve as many clock cycles as you can. So a micro kernel isn’t well suited for that specific domain. The case would be different again for any modern low footprint hardware because they’d still be running on CPUs clocked at an order of magnitude more and modern embedded system might need to take security or stability concerns more seriously than an air gapped 90s game console.

In short, micro kernels are the future but the N64, being a retro system, needs an approach from the past.

This is why it doesn’t help how modern and 90s hardware have been conflated as equivalent throughout this discussion.

> However on the N64 you don’t need any of the benefits that a micro kernel offers while you do need to preserve as many clock cycles as you can. So a micro kernel isn’t well suited for that specific domain

How come that Nintendo decided to use them (according to reverse engeneering finds)? If they are not suited, then Nintendo should know that right?

I’ve answered this question probably half a dozen times already now....

The N64 doesn’t run any OS. It’s just firmware that invokes a ROM which runs bare metal.

The Switch, however, does have an operating system.

There is around 20 years difference between the two games consoles. That’s 20 years of Moore’s law. 20 years of consumer expectations of fast processors and fancier graphics. And 20 years of evolution with developer tooling and thus their expectations.

You cannot compare the two consoles in the way you’re trying to. It’s like comparing a 1920s racing car to a 2020s F1 car and asking why they are so different. Simply put: because technology has advanced so much in that time it’s now possible to do stuff that wasn’t dreamt of before.

Ah okay, I somehow thought that Nintendo had used microkernels on other devices too, not just the Switch. The Nintendo Switch is certainly not a constrained device.

It’s theoretically possible they may have done on other devices too. It’s believed the Switch system software is derived from the DS system software. I’ve not seen any breakdowns on what kernels are running in the DS nor on the Wii family of devices either. But there still orders of magnitude more powerful than the N64 too.

I don’t think there’s much to be gained in speculation about proprietary operating systems running on newer hardware though.

No one forces you to read or reply to them, so whatever.

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