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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Not sure that NT kernel is inferior to UNIX/POSIX. It was by David Cutler modelled after VMS, which was state of the art at one point.

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Maybe after decades we have to accept that batched, concurrent I/O with asynchronous notifications is the least bad interface that can exploit the potential of modern hardware and let the simpler to use default Unix I/O model (blocking, synchronous) go. If this happens I hope we'll get a better designed API than some hacks around eBPF and io_uring.

The kernel, I've been told by people more knowledgeable about this things than myself, is a work of beauty. But the layers and layers of Win32 that sit on top of it do a great job of covering that up.

Well, the benchmarks don't tell that.

You know what they say about benchmarks... ;-)

I prefer Linux, but performance is not my main grief about Windows.

I fail to see what is particularly brillant about this kernel. Drivers are convoluted. IRQL is convoluted. The supposed distniction between "kernel" and executive has little definition and is convoluted (esp given it duplicates somes primitives for no real reasons). The HAL was a false good idea and Cultler himself agree with that. The network stack splitted betwen user and kernel space makes no sense (and the story behind this, including afd.sys, is ridiculous)

It's a not great / not terrible kernel, like most are (Linux included)

I rely entirely on hearsay. You sound like you know more about the NT kernel's internals than I do, so I'll take your word for it.

Which kernels are good?

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