History
The realization of drawbacks in design and performance of the first-generation Mach microkernel led a number of developers to re-examine the entire microkernel concept in the mid-1990s. The asynchronous in-kernel-buffering process communication concept used in Mach turned out to be one of the main reasons for its poor performance. This induced developers of Mach-based operating systems to move some time-critical components, like file systems or drivers, back inside the kernel. While this somewhat ameliorated the performance issues, it plainly violates the minimality concept of a true microkernel (and squanders their major advantages).
Detailed analysis of the Mach bottleneck indicated that, among other things, its working set is too large: the IPC code expresses poor spatial locality; that is, it results in too many cache misses, of which most are in-kernel. This analysis gave rise to the principle that an efficient microkernel should be small enough such the majority of performance-critical code fits into cache (preferably a small fraction of said cache).
Read more about this topic: L4 Microkernel Family
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)