Micro Kernel vs Monolithic Kernel
Image courtesy: wikipedia
As I have mentioned in the earlier post I am
going to discuss about monolith and micro kernel. The word “mono-lith”
literally means single chunk of rock. Linux kernel is monolithic and like the
literal meaning of this word all of the components of the kernel space behaves
as a single chunk. Monolithic kernel resides as a single big chunk in the
virtual address space after system boot and whenever you create a kernel module
it becomes part of this chunk.
Micro kernel as the name implies is lightweight
or small. A lot of kernel work moved to user space so that we have micro kernel
and the kernel provides bare minimum primitive functionalities. Typically Real
time operating systems like VxWorks. Several servers runs in micro kernel in
daemon mode and they provide specific set of services to processes such as
networking services, file system services. Inter process communication here is
facilitated by the IPC server.
Thus as shown in the diagram above few features of monolithic kernel has been shifted to user spcae in micro kernel to reduce the size and overhead.
Micro Kernel vs Monolithic Kernel
Image courtesy: wikipedia
Micro kernel as the name implies is lightweight or small. A lot of kernel work moved to user space so that we have micro kernel and the kernel provides bare minimum primitive functionalities. Typically Real time operating systems like VxWorks. Several servers runs in micro kernel in daemon mode and they provide specific set of services to processes such as networking services, file system services. Inter process communication here is facilitated by the IPC server.
Thus as shown in the diagram above few features of monolithic kernel has been shifted to user spcae in micro kernel to reduce the size and overhead.
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