Andy Microbaum

Andy abhors monolithic kernels like Linux, Windows or BSD. He rather writes a carefully designed little kernel that does some basic stuff and leaves the rest for user space.

Pro's & Con's

Pro:

• easier to maintain

Con:

• more overhead
• harder to program

Going further than Andy Microbaum

Consider other kernel designs: Layered, modular or even smaller (nanokernel, exokernel)

Andy Microbaum's bookshelf

Research papers on microkernels

Andy Microbaum's opponents position

Monolithic kernel (= all in one big kernel) Mono Lizzy

See also the famous Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate

People and OSes related to Andy Microbaum

• Amoeba [1] (a libre distributed OS)
• Mach (the fundament of Hurd)
• QNX is a proprietary 32-bit POSIX OS. Its microkernel design was chosen to allow extreme modularity allowing it to run on extremely tiny hardware. Its GUI was also modular and designed similarly to a microkernel. In the 90s, a demo was made, fitting onto a single 1.4MB floppy disk the OS with window system, GUI web browser and other programs, web server, a virtual file device creating dynamic content for the web server, and network drivers.
• PeterX I'm strongly against a monolithic kernel, so I fall more or less under the microkernel category
• eekee -- I'm planning a microkernel with the goal of making it easy to write new services, even trivial ones. The relative ease of maintaining a microkernel also attracted me, and I'm enjoying the challenge of designing interfaces for minimal overhead.