Does anyone know of a good, sober treatise on the suitability of microkernels for multitenancy and/or split priority systems?
Hypervisors just seem like particularly impoverished microkernels to me. It reminds me of social programs working hard to avoid the term Socialism because of emotional baggage. Oh this is definitely not a microkernel? Is it a full privilege program that handles a small number of system-wide concerns and delegates the maximum number of other concerns to processes running at a lower privilege level? Yes? Then can we call it a… no? Okay buddy.
> At the last HotOS, Mendel Rosenblum gave an ‘outrageous’ opinion that the academic obsession with microkernels during the past two decades produced many publications but little impact. He argued that virtual machine monitors (VMMs) had had considerably more practical uptake, despite—or perhaps due to—being principally developed by industry.
> In this paper, we investigate this claim in light of our experiences in developing the Xen [1] virtual machine monitor. We argue that modern VMMs present a practical platform which allows the development and deployment of innovative systems research: in essence, VMMs are microkernels done right.
(Edited to add relevant paragraphs from the abstract.)
Most people use kernel to mean "operating system kernel" only. Your definition is a superset of that, so it fits the general definition but then expands it in a way that doesn't have broad consensus. That's why people disagree with you.
Hypervisors just seem like particularly impoverished microkernels to me. It reminds me of social programs working hard to avoid the term Socialism because of emotional baggage. Oh this is definitely not a microkernel? Is it a full privilege program that handles a small number of system-wide concerns and delegates the maximum number of other concerns to processes running at a lower privilege level? Yes? Then can we call it a… no? Okay buddy.