[gjsman-1000]

I wonder if there would be a market for an enterprise-grade server microkernel OS. It's not the 90s anymore - Nintendo and QNX are shipping tens of millions of microkernel installs every year; and hardware is fast enough that choosing correctness and security over speed is a valid tradeoff. Maybe if I win the lottery...

[TylerE]

These things tend to trade 200% performance for 10% security, though. That's not a tradeoff I am comfortable with in anything like all situations.

[gjsman-1000]

Not necessarily if you build them right. Nintendo’s Switch is a true microkernel and, if it cost 200% performance, there’s no way it would be viable on a 2015 Tegra X1. The 200% thing is kind of a myth that doesn’t apply to modern practice - now it’s more like 10%.

As for 10% security - it’s more than 10%. Take my same example, the Switch. No bugs have been found to launch unapproved software in the last 4 years. There’s always the Secure Boot bug by NVIDIA in earlier consoles, but not even a WebKit bug will get you homebrew on a Switch. Kind of a big deal…

Another example of this would be Microsoft’s experiments with what would happen if an OS was built with all apps running in managed code - no compiled apps. Performance cost? They got it down to just 7% (though, admittedly, Midori never shipped, but it did host Bing in a few countries for a few years.)

[vbezhenar]

Kaspersky recently developed their own proprietary microkernel OS. AFAIK they target it for IoT, but kernel is kernel, probably could be used with ordinary servers as well.

Main issue is drivers, of course. It's hard to beat Linux. It contains open source drivers and server vendors usually target Linux and Windows with their driver efforts.