[Philpax]

The choice of a pure-monolithic kernel is also interesting; I can buy that it's more secure, but having to recompile the kernel every time you change hardware sounds like it would be pretty tedious. Early days, though, so we'll see how that decision works out.

[vlovich123]

Why would you buy it’s more secure. Traditionally in windows in-kernel compositing was a constant source of security vulnerabilities. Sure rust may help the obvious memory corruption possibilities but I’m not convinced.

[Rohansi]

Why would you need to recompile if hardware changes? Linux manages just fine as a monolithic kernel that ships with support for many devices in the same kernel build.

[ofrzeta]

It's true that you can compile everything in but it's not really the standard practice. On a stock distro you have dozens of dynamic modules loaded.

[ori_b]

OpenBSD removed support for loadable modules. Hardware today is big enough that compiling everything in is fine, and we don't need a ton of fiddly code to put a special-purpose linker into the kernel. Saving a bit of memory isn't worth the risk.

[LavenderDay3544]

Even a fully loaded kernel with loads of drivers isn't that big. And not all of it has to be resident in memory at all times. Code in general is miniscule compared to data. And most of a kernel's data isn't baked into the executable. And this kernel in particular has very thin drivers that only abstract real devices to generic device class interfaces that userspace has to deal with directly. That's the part that's inspired by exokernels and hypervisor paravirtualization. That means that drivers for this kernel will be even smaller than those for other ones like Linux.

[astrange]

A monolithic kernel and resource locators that automatically mount network drives? That's just macOS.

(You don't have to recompile the kernel if you put all the device drivers in it, just keep the object files around and relink it.)

[LavenderDay3544]

Incremental compilation makes that a lot less heavyweight than you would think and the idea is to automate the process so the average non-technical user doesn't need to know or care how it works.