[hgs3]

> reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.

It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.

[wolvoleo]

True but it's not exactly new. I remember Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvald's heated discussions in the early 90s :) Minix featured a microkernel before linux existed.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....

[bcrl]

Given the tectonic shift in priorities for Linux kernel development over the past decade, I'm willing to bet that many key developers would be open to a microkernel architecture now than ~25+ years ago. CPUs now have hardware features that reduce the overhead of MMU context changes which gets rid of a significant part of the cost of having isolated address spaces to contain code. The Meltdown and Spectre attacks really forced the security issue to the point where major performance costs to improve security became acceptable in a way that was not the case in the '90s or '00s.