[openbeos] Re: Is BeOS a true microkernel?
- From: "Michael Phipps" <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 20:18:43 -0500
>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.
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