[rdtsc]

Thank you for responding that is a good description.

I remember someone from one of the government agencies gave a talk at in college many years ago about INTEGRITY-178B and about this separation kernel idea.

That was maybe 7-10 ago. The idea was pretty neat. And the claim was that the future will belong to more secure OSes based on this separation kernel (microkernel?). And how say every little component -- memory, filesystem, mouse, display are all in userspace. He talked about ok general purpose computer at that time were too slow to operate in that way (so Linux was better and winning because of performance). But just wait some 10 years or so and machines will be so fast that it won't matter.

So since then that story kind of stuck with me that kind of prompted the question.