Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

So you save a few milliseconds if you don't initialize some filesystems, good but makes very little difference in the end.

Not having a hard disk? Doesn't require a microkernel at all. Booting over LAN has been practical for a long time.

If I glance the closest linux machine I have, it has a 6MB kernel with 10MB initrd. To put that on a server with gigabytes of ram? Trimming an unused networking stack here is not the use case where a microkernel will help performance.



I agree, this doesn't seem very compelling.

Perhaps there is a use case that is compelling, but this particular one doesn't do it for me.


A single disk seek takes a few milliseconds. If you need to do any kind of disk verification, it will take longer than a few milliseconds.


The "few milliseconds" was a response to "Your system will start faster because it doesn't have to do things like initialize the various pseudo-filesystems Linux has, or initialize the virtual file system, or any number of other tasks." Doing that init takes very little time and zero disk accesses. That and a few megabytes of ram are all you save by using a microkernel instead of linux in this situation.

Linux won't access the hard drive if it's unnecessary, same as the microkernel.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: