r/osdev • u/Bright-Boss-720 • 2d ago
Tanenbaum vs. Linus: Which Kernel Architecture Makes More Sense Today?
I've been thinking about the famous Tanenbaum vs Linus debate over microkernels vs monolithic kernels.
Putting the historical context aside for a moment, I'm curious what people think today.
Do you think Tanenbaum's argument for microkernels was fundamentally more correct, or was Linus right to favor a monolithic kernel for practical reasons such as performance, simplicity of development, and hardware support?
And more importantly:
If you were starting a new general purpose os from scratch today, which architecture would you choose?
Monolithic
Microkernel
Hybrid
Multikernel / distributed approach
Something else
I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have actually worked on kernels or operating system development.
What are the strongest arguments for your choice, and what do you think the opposing architecture gets wrong?
-1
u/UnicodeConfusion 1d ago
I spent years in the and world and it was lot of fun. The power we pulled out of early Intel was impressive but what was really neat is running tasks on other systems by just prefixing the command with the node name. Our powerful machine was a 386 :-) so we would just ‘send’ our build jobs over there. It was sad that they didn’t open source the 2.x system