[nickpsecurity]

The communication would've happened anyway. Now it just happens through a common mechanism with strong isolation. That all the most resilient systems, especially in safety-critical space, are microkernels speaks for itself. For instance, MINIX 3 is already quite robust for a system that's had hardly any work at all on it. Windows and UNIX systems each took around a decade to approach that. Just the driver isolation by itself goes a long way.

Now, I'd prefer an architecture where we can use regular programming languages and function calls. A number of past and present hardware architectures are designed to protect things such as pointers or control flow. Those in production are not, but have MMU's & at least two rings. So, apps on them will both get breached due to inherently broken architecture and can be isolated through microkernel architecture with interface protections, too. So, it's really a kludgey solution to a problem caused by stupid hardware.

Still hasn't been a single monolithic system to match their reliability, security, and maintenance without clustering, though.

[coldtea]

>For instance, MINIX 3 is already quite robust for a system that's had hardly any work at all on it. Windows and UNIX systems each took around a decade to approach that. Just the driver isolation by itself goes a long way.

MINIX3 also has hardly any work done WITH it, so I don't think we can compare it to Windows and UNIX systems regarding robustness, unless we submit it to the same wide range of scenarios, use cases and work loads...

[nickpsecurity]

I'd like to see a battery of tests to see where it's truly at. Yet, there's still not a MINIX Hater's Handbook or something similar. That's more than UNIX's beginnings can say. ;)

[sergiolp]

Communication would've happened, but probably between far less actors. So, you have a communication channel which is orders of magnitude slower, and bigger communication needs. Not good.

That said, about the reliability point, I agree with you. If you're building an specialized system, and reliability is your main concern, microkernels+multiservers are the way to go (or, perhaps, virtualization with hardware extensions, but this is a pretty new technology for some industries).

Probably you're going to need to add orthogonal persistence to the mix, to be able to properly recover from a server failure, or an alternative way to sync states, which will also have an impact on performance. But again, you're gaining reliability in exchange.

[nickpsecurity]

The communication channel does get slower. The good news is that applications are often I/O bound: lots of comms can happen between such activity if designed for that. One trick used in the 90's was to modify a processor to greatly reduce both context switching and message passing overhead. A similar thing could be done today.

Of course, if one can modify a CPU, I'd modify it to eliminate the need for message-passing microkernels. :)