[openbeos] Re: Is BeOS a true microkernel?
- From: "John Gabriele" <jandl@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 21:43:36 EST
Thanks for the replies. This is pretty tasty stuff.
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.
>>If so, would someone mind summing up what the whole
>>mechanism/policy concept means with regard to the
>>OBOS/BeOS client-server-kernel architecture?
>
>AFAIK, simply this. Stay out of kernel land. Little needs to be there.
>Mostly file systems and drivers. Servers do the "heavy lifting" -
>depending on who wrote what (style thing) the client can be anything
>from almost empty to fairly fat.
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 ()?
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?
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