Category Archives: microkernel

OS design

Working on a “process algebra” post, I had to look up previous posts on microkernels where I wrote this: Information hiding is only good design when the hidden information is not needed by the software it is hidden from! If you hide information that you need to share you’re just wasting time. A great example [...]

Operating system research – 16 years perspective

It’s somewhat funny and somewhat sad to read this thread on the old USENET. Starting out with Andy Tanenbaum’s proposed list of accepted truths (most of which I thought wrong at the time) GENERALLY ACCEPTED AS TRUE BY RESEARCHERS IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS – The client-server paradigm is a good one – Microkernels are the way [...]

Sparc T2 (niagra 2)

UT architecture seminar today was by Greg Grohoski from Sun – an updated version of his Hot Chips talk. I’m not a big fan of this approach to chip architecture: 8 processors, each with 8 threads, but they are working hard on a real problem. The problem is the usual one of high speed processors [...]