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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!pacbell.com!well!barrnet.net!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!gatech!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!news.mathworks.com!news2.near.net!satisfied.elf.com!deathstar.riva.com!iriscom!david From: david@iriscom.com (David Ehrens) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Is BSD a Microkernel OS? Message-ID: <782614564.90snx@iriscom.com> References: <382sed$25c@mail.fwi.uva.nl> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 94 00:56:04 GMT Organization: Iris Communications Lines: 15 In article <382sed$25c@mail.fwi.uva.nl> casper@fwi.uva.nl writes: [snip] >From a design point of view, microkernels are superior, because they >force modularity. However, you can use modularisation in a monolithic >kernel too. And people have discovered that you really can't >afford to build a pure micro kernel, it's just too slow. QNX is based on a microkernel and its performance, even on older 386's, is acceptable. Whatever you may think of QNX (please, no flamefests!), I think the generalization above is a bit too sweeping. I _do_ agree that monolithic kernels can be modularized to some degree, too. David Ehrens, david@iriscom.com