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by e12e
4502 days ago
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I recall hearing old NT hands saying that in the early versions of NT, it was more of a micro-kernel -- eg. the video driver ran in user space. So if the video-driver crashed (obviously leaving the screen in an unusable state) -- it was still possible to restart the driver via the keyboard -- no OS reboot needed. But at the time, they couldn't get the performance they wanted, so moved the stuff into the kernel -- the rest is a long history of blue screens of death... |
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Thankfully as of Vista, video drivers are back in userspace.
NT is still a microkernel by design. What Microsoft did was to keep the modules logically separated and use kernel internal RPC to switch between areas of responsibility in the kernel. Even if it looks like a monolithic one.
This is how hybrid mikrokernels tend to work.
Since Vista the support for user space drivers has been improved a lot.