Re: microkernel design question

> As example, on my NetBSD box, I have the following "drivers" running:
> IDE
> SCSI
> ATAPI
> VGA card
> WSCons (virtual consoles driver)
> NE2000 network card
> TCP/IP
> NFS
> BSD FFS filesystem
> MS-DOS FAT filesystem
> Linux EXT2 filesystem
> ISO 9660 filesystem
> SoundBlaster sound card
> Sun audio interface
> MIDI
> PS/2 mouse
>
> This is pretty typical for a real-world machine. On a VSTa box, each
> of these 16 drivers/subsystems would be a separate process,

not quite. In BSD, you configure subdrivers seperately from drivers
(for example soundblaster subdriver and the audio subsystem). In VSTa
these two would likely be in the same process. Perhaps the master driver
would be encapsulated in a library. At any rate, ATAPI and IDE may
well be together, console and VGA would likely be together,
MIDI, soundblaster and audio would likely be together. The filesystems
would only be run when they are in use [ie. a filesystem is mounted]
(do you normally use nfs, ffs, fat, ext2 and iso9660 on the same time on
the same system?).

As for the answer to your question, I don't know. Hopefully someone
else will pick that up.

> Mirian Crzig Lennox Systems Anarchist
Received on Thu Jul 15 11:27:07 1999