Bakul Shah writes: > One thing I have mused about is recasting plan9 as a > microkernel and pushing out a lot of its kernel code into user > mode code. It is already half way there -- it is basically a > mux for 9p calls, low level device drivers, VM support & some > process related code.
Somewhat related to this ... after reading some papers on TCP-in-user-space implementations, I've been thinking about how an interface that supported fast/secure page flipping between the kernel and process address space would change how we do things. E.g. right now Plan 9 suffers from a *lot* of data copying between the kernel and processes, and between processes themselves. If we could eliminate most of that copying, things would get a lot faster. Dealing with the security issues isn't trivial, but the programmer time going into eeking out the last bit of I/O throughput of the current scheme could be redirected. If it works, this would reduce the kernel back to handling process/memory management, and talking to the hardware. Not a micro-kernel, but just as good from a practical standpoint. And no, this wouldn't get us to running on the 11/70. But by taking advantage of modern large virtual memory spaces by using page flipping, we could cut down on physical memory usage in the kernel. --lyndon
