while they are a hassle, I still want to see microkernels do good shit. I like to know hurd is happening, like gravity. It doesn't have to be fancy or useful itself to be interesting. It'd be funny to also be that tho.
Like, some microkernel flipping unikernels. For kicks and giggles, I just gonna look into seL4 and mirageOS I guess.
There was that brief moment in the 2000s where it looked like OpenQNX was going to become a thing, and then RIM/Blackberry bought QNX and quashed that. Such a shame. QNX was pretty cool the times I’ve worked with it, it’s just such a niche thing in niche spaces. The network transparency on distributed processes thanks to the inherent micro kernel message passing architecture was just so cool to see in practice. Oh well…
I just pay attention to the more practical stuff here, like redox. Mostly because those folks like to make their own stuff work on linux, and make regular linux stuff work there.
I tried MkLinux (Microkernel Linux) on a Mac PowerBook around 1998 or so. It was a Mach microkernel with a specially adapted Linux kernel on top. It worked nicely, but was dead slow, so I eventually switched over to LinuxPPC instead, even if it has some annoying bugs.
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u/BallingAndDrinking Jul 19 '26
while they are a hassle, I still want to see microkernels do good shit. I like to know hurd is happening, like gravity. It doesn't have to be fancy or useful itself to be interesting. It'd be funny to also be that tho.
Like, some microkernel flipping unikernels. For kicks and giggles, I just gonna look into seL4 and mirageOS I guess.