>Thanks for the replies. This is pretty tasty stuff. Sure. >M.Phipps: >>A microkernel, by Tanenbaum's definition (page 388) only does 4 things: >>Interprocess communication (BMessages/ports, for us), some >>memory management, limited amount of low-level process management >>and scheduling and low level i/o. > >Only. Well, that sounds like quite a bit right there. It sounds like >the kernel does all the servers' low-level bidding. Pretty much. When people ask me what an OS does, I describe it as the piece that manages the hardware and abstracts applications from hardware. I consider that to really be the kernels job, and everything else on top of it is a convenience library. :-) >So, does this mean that most of the system calls (to the kernel) are very >basic (that is, they do rather simple, well-defined, low-level tasks) and >that library calls are higher-level and composed (among other things) >of "heavy lifting" combinations of the system calls ()? Yes. Usually things like "give me 2 meg of ram" or "load this file". Very simple. >It sounds like the idea is to also to keep the *number* of system/kernel >calls (that exist) to a minimum. About how many does NewOS have? Couldn't tell you at this point. Since UserLand accesses are not really seperated out properly, no one knows how this will all play out. :-) Honestly, as few as possible.