|
|
|
|
|
|
by mike_hearn
794 days ago
|
|
|
There was an seL4 summit last year: https://www.youtube.com/@seL4/videos Anyway the trend has been that regular mainstream kernels steadily adopt more microkernel-like features when it can be shown to not harm performance too much. MacOS/iOS aren't technically microkernels, but they incorporate Mach into the core and a typical system will have thousands of possible servers that can be reached via Mach. Those servers are all sandboxed pretty heavily too, so you get the security benefits. The core filesystem and networking stack do still run in kernel mode because there aren't many benefits there (moving them to user space doesn't remove them from the TCB and) but over time more and more stuff has been kicked out to user space. The same can be seen in Windows where over time more subsystems get extracted to user space servers. Linux has a less well defined architecture than Apple's platforms and there are way fewer services reachable via DBUS than on macOS, but the same trends can be seen there too with support for direct user space access to devices, FUSE, user space schedulers, eBPF and so on. So there isn't I think much interest in pure microkernels now. Linux has got flexible enough that you can make it as micro-kernelly as you want, but the current balance seems about right for nearly all use cases. The stuff that remains in-kernel generally isn't a big source of vulnerabilities, moving stuff to userspace wouldn't help anyway but would reduce performance a lot. |
|
|
Honestly I feel that Linux server users are performance freaks and will kill for 0.1% performance. So it's very unlikely that they'll trade anything for it. They don't need stability, they'll just recreate server if necessary. They need absolute minimum of security (otherwise they would use VMs instead of containers).