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phendrenad2 a day ago

Most kernels are kind of the same really. Some have slightly fancier inter-process communication. Leading to my all-time favorite YouTube video, an explainer on Android IPC cut like a spy thriller. I'm not even joking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb4UoqXPEtI

qubex 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Er, uhm… I have to disagree really. You have monolithic kernels versus micro kernels, I’ve used weird stuff such as DragonFlyBSD, Plan9, and BeOS. Even the Windows NT kernel (now mainline Windows) is a very unusual piece of software engineering.

phendrenad2 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess that depends on where you draw the line at "kernel" and what you consider "unusual".

I study kernels for fun, so I've had a lot of opinions like that over the years, but none survived gaining more experience. For example, I used to think that the Windows NT kernel was a microkernel, then I thought that it was a hybrid, but now I know that it's actually monolithic. Likewise, I now understand that the major differences between the FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD kernel are really just a few hundred lines of code, nothing major. But if you Google it, it'll make it sound like they're worlds apart.

Part of this is understanding that what people call "the kernel" usually includes a lot of things that, arguably shouldn't be considered part of the kernel proper. And a lot of the differences people cite between kernels come down to different message-passing architectures that are extremely interesting academically, but don't show up in real-world testing.

The sad part is, you can't reach this level of understanding though normal means, every source of information is full of half-truths. You have to dig into the source code and run these things on a bench yourself.

Cockbrand 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is great stuff, thank you for sharing!

Bluestein a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I have got to say this is one of the single most interesting things I've seen in a while. And she ... she's a goddess - so quirky! :)