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Comment by iforgot22 | Hacker News Reader

Modern macOS might be optimized for Apple Silicon CPUs. But even when it was Intel only, there were probably times when Windows was lighter, albeit bad in other ways.

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It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. And on ARM it wastes memory due to its 16KiB pages.

Neither of them use microkernels. They are monolithic kernels with loadable module support ("hybrid" kernels). The cores of both Windows NT and XNU were originally microkernels, but then they put all of the servers into the kernel address space to make them into the monolithic kernels that they are today.

XNU apparently stands for "X is not Unix." Well that's confusing.

It actually was a recursive acronym that stood for XNU is Not UNIX. Then at some point Apple got it UNIX certified as part of MacOS.

> It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature.

Yawn. Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ?

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ?

(Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)

You're comparing a modern microkernel to something originating from the 80s?

Keep your rude attitude to yourself.

It's from 1993. Also be more precise about what exactly you are meaning by writing "It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature."

Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense.

kthxbye

Why is this convo about kernels so angry? And macOS isn't even based on a microkernel.

i forgot ;)

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