Btw. The Linux kernel does more than one thing.
But monolithic kernels are much better for small student projects that won’t be relevant anymore, when Gnu Hurd comes out
Monolithic kernels are also generally more performant, compared to micro-kernels, it turns out. A bit counter-intuitive at first but, makes sense when you think about it.
Micro-kernels in general-purpose OSes suffer from a death of a thousand cuts due to context switching. Something that would be a single callback to the kernel in a monolith turns into a mess of calls bouncing between kernel and user space. When using something like an RTOS where hardware is not likely intended for general-purpose computing, this is not an issue but, when you start adding all of the complexity of user-installable applications that need storage, graphics, inputs, etc, the number of calls gets huge.
Btw. The Linux kernel does more than one thing. But monolithic kernels are much better for small student projects that won’t be relevant anymore, when Gnu Hurd comes out
Any day now…
Too thick
Monolithic kernels are also generally more performant, compared to micro-kernels, it turns out. A bit counter-intuitive at first but, makes sense when you think about it.
Micro-kernels in general-purpose OSes suffer from a death of a thousand cuts due to context switching. Something that would be a single callback to the kernel in a monolith turns into a mess of calls bouncing between kernel and user space. When using something like an RTOS where hardware is not likely intended for general-purpose computing, this is not an issue but, when you start adding all of the complexity of user-installable applications that need storage, graphics, inputs, etc, the number of calls gets huge.