Hacker News Reader

Comment by unicron | Hacker News Reader

I reckon that "drug induced microkernel" was a stab at Tanenbaum :-)

Pretty stupid stab, to be honest. Every major desktop/workstation operating system uses microkernel or hybrid architecture (even NT, yeah, that's true; I know that Linux thinks hybrid is another word for macro-). And it is like this for some purpose. To my best knowledge being macrokernel makes Linux "huge and bloated" like someone has once said.

NT puts third-party written graphics drivers into Ring 0. That's definitely not a microkernel. As for whether or not hybrid is another word for Macro, whatever. If that's a face-saving way for microkernel advocates to avoid admitting that their original idea was insane, I'm fine with that.

Linus's quote was "drug induced microkernel", however. It wasn't "drug induced microkernel or hybrid architecture" --- although if you run Windows or are forced by a family member to be a Windows support desk, you have my pity....

> forced by a family member to be a Windows support desk, you have my pity....

Thank you - it's nice to know there are people out there thinking about us :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel search Windows or NT. OS X, Linux and NT don't use microkernels.

NT and OS X use hybrid kernels (as well as Plan9). Linus believe that hybrid is another term for monolithic, but rest of the world does not.

AFAIR micro- ones are used by QNX and Minix. Monolithic kernels are used by Linux, *BSD (with an exception for Dragonfly, which uses hybrid kernel), Solaris, AIX(?) and more SysV descendants.

< NT and OS X use hybrid kernels (as well as Plan9). Linus believe that hybrid is another term for monolithic, but rest of the world does not.

Count me out of 'the rest of the world' then. Perhaps you can point me to the what part of NT which would make it a hybrid kernel as opposed to Linux. I've never seen any explanation of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel No, Windows and OS X use hybrid kernels.

It could be the hurd project. He does have that semi-famous "just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people" quote.

No it was an obvious (and in my opinion childish) stab at Minix/Tanenbaum (although Tanenbaum sure is just as childish) given that Tanenbaum is still saying that Linux and monolithic kernels are bad, Stallman on the other hand openly admitted his mistake in going with the mach microkernel. The Linus/Tanenbaum adversity is as alive as ever judging by comments like this and the recent-ish interview with Tanenbaum : http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229/comments/1291183 where his comments on Linux and it's success is very telling.

It sounded to me more like a simple reference to re-enforce that this is not about theoretical stuff, it's about a piece of software actually being used all over the place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com