[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“This is an aspect of FOSS that is regaining some
measure of interest: for years, it was considered that writing
production-ready FOSS meant lean and mean software. However, recent
events have shown that, in the case of the Linux kernel, this is no
longer exactly true: performance is dropping slowly yet steadily.“How come?
“Bloat
“The Linux kernel is monolithic: it means that every hardware
driver runs in kernel memory space. Every time you add a driver,
you add stuff to the kernel. Moreover, for performance reasons,
several user-space elements make their way into the kernel and
increase its bloat even further.“Moreover, Linux has historically been developed for x86
platforms, and is tightly linked to the architecture, going as far
as using hardware interrupts in code (essentially, mixing x86
assembly in the much more generic and portable C code).“On top of that, since everything hardware related runs in
kernel space, it is unstable by design: a bug in a hardware driver
means that a network card can crash the system. Linux is literally
the opposite of a micro kernel.”