Yesterday Huawei Huawei Developers Conference officially announced the Songshan Lake obscurity operating system, which is one of the highlights - the microkernel. Huawei claims that microkernel-enabled, its speed is greatly improved, and produce transformational breakthroughs in safety, to break the monolithic micro-kernel under the root user can get all the permissions practice, greatly enhanced the security.
What is a microkernel it?
Microkernel architecture consists of a very simple hardware abstraction layer and a key group of primitives or system components call; these primitives, including the establishment of a system only several parts necessary; such as inter-thread management, address spaces and interprocess communication Wait.
Micronucleus goal is to achieve the basic operating rules and system of system services separate. For example, input / output processes locking services may be provided by a service component run outside of micronuclei. More advanced operating system very modular operation of these user mode for the server to complete, this design allows the kernel of the most core part of the design simpler. A service component failure does not lead to collapse of the entire system, the kernel needs to be done, just restart the components without affecting other parts
The many microkernel OS services into separate processes, such as file systems, device drivers, and OS service call process passes through the message. Microkernel architecture must be multi-threaded, first-generation micro-kernel, the kernel provides more the service, known as the 'fat microkernel', it is a typical representative of MACH, it is both GNU HURD is APPLE SERVER OS kernel, it can be said, flourishing second-generation micro-kernel provides only the most basic OS services, typical the OS is QNX, QNX theorists famous, is considered to be an advanced OS.
The use of micro-kernel operating system design
Is not a new concept microkernel, it has a long history of existence, of the following operating systems are based microkernel architecture design:
- AⅨ
- BeOS
- L4 microkernel family
- Mach, used in GNU Hurd and Mac OS X
- Minix
- MorphOS
- QNX
- RadiOS
- VSTa
- RT-Thread
Know someone almost on a microkernel next conclusion:
Micro-kernel has failed. In the commercial-grade operating systems (including open source operating system that can be used in mission critical), in addition to L4 are still struggling to keep some shares, no micro-kernel market.
The first-generation micro-kernel is a wrong way to solve the wrong problem. The second-generation micro-kernel, but is the right way to solve the wrong problem.
Original to see https://www.zhihu.com/question/19716757
What is Linux monolithic kernel or microkernel
Linux is a single core structure, but also absorb the advantages of micro-kernel: modular design, to support dynamically loaded kernel modules. Linux also avoids defects on the micro-kernel design, so that everything runs in kernel mode, direct call function without messaging.
As early as 1992, Linus had engaged in a famous debate about the operating system kernel choice and Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum believed to micro-kernel architecture design of the operating system, in theory, more superior than the macro core architecture, advocating Linux microkernel architecture should be redesigned. But Linus views on the development of practices to fight back, select the macro statements Linux kernel architecture for development reasons, and compare the difference in performance with Minix for Linux. You can understand the argument by Wikipedia full details .
Tanenbaum - renowned technical writer, educator and researcher, IEEE Senior Member, ACM senior member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, the 1997 ACM Computer Science Education Outstanding Contribution Award in 2002 texty outstanding teaching award, the 10th ACM Symposium operating system outstanding paper Award, was included in "Who's Who in the World" characters directory.
The figure is a schematic diagram of a simple two structural macro kernel (left) and microkernel (right):
Of course, the end user, we do not care what program uses. From a practical point of view, the microkernel seems a long way to go.
We look forward to obscurity system as soon as possible to give the end-users.