Meta: Excellent summary

Posted Jan 18, 2007 22:11 UTC (Thu) by kmself (guest, #11565)
Parent article: LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems

Jon, just wanted to say that this is the sort of excellent, technical coverage that we really love from LWN (well, that, the Grumpy Editor series, and Debian developer licensing objections). Well worth the subscription.

On the technical side, it's interesting to note that there are also two developing routes to Tannenbaum's nirvana (nerdvana?). Microkernel architectures are one. Domain-separation through paravirtualization, a'la Xen, is another. While kernels themselves might remain monolithic, potentially hazardous activities (hardware interactions, user interfaces) can be split from one another, while the bogeyman of microkernels -- massive message-passing overheads -- are largely avoided.

Still, the key principles as reported are very sound.

Thanks!