Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 18:38:57 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> To: davidg@Root.COM Cc: mikebo@tellabs.com, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: OSF Micro Kernel for Linux/FreeBSD/etc (fwd) Message-ID: <199603262338.SAA20029@dyson.iquest.net> In-Reply-To: <199603261944.LAA09127@Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Mar 26, 96 11:44:00 am
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> > >FreeBSD hackers - > >I received a copy of this from a friend who does a lot of PowerPC work. > >Since I've seen nothing about this on the FreeBSD lists as yet, I thought > >some of you might like to know about this new frontier. The article > >mentions FreeBSD, but perhaps the discussion is more germane to NetBSD. > > > >Is the FreeBSD core team open to the idea of possibly moving to a Mach > >3.0 micro-kernel, or is there significant sentimental attachment to > >the traditional, monolithic BSD kernel? > > No, we're not open to the idea. > I want to chime in (essentially agreeing with David Greenman). The reason is that the monolithic kernel has some advantages that the Mach microkernel doesn't and vice versa. My view is that FreeBSD is eventually meant to be a high performance, multi-processor, multi-platform OS. Right now we are working primarily on performance with multi-processor and multi-platform issues being worked also. Eventually, more of us will be working more aggressively on multi-processor support and multi-platform. MACH based OSes sometimes have serious problems with performance (esp under memory loading conditions.) MACH is interesting because of it's ability to emulate other OSes (of course FreeBSD can do so in a different way). I guess what I am trying to say is that the disadvantages appear to outweigh the advantages. I think that the work that has been done in Lites, etc is very interesting and a valuable, interesting alternative, but FreeBSD is very high performance and it would take quite a bit of time working on MACH to make it perform as well as FreeBSD. The reason is not sentiment, but simply being practical. I have been intrigued by MACH for a long time, but it doesn't really help do the U**X thing very much... John
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