Micro/Nano/Maxi Kernels - How Small is Beautiful?

Microkernel is the term that has come into vogue to describe the ideal indispensible parts of the operating system, since most vendors implementations of the Unix System grew beyond the elegant 64kbytes of version 6 days. Because an operating system means different things to different people (does it include the file system, the scheduler, the communications code?) we will see many different views of what should be in a microkernel. Also because of different expertise with hardware (e.g. MMU/Context Switch support, Number of contexts supported), views of the relative cost of ;SPM_quot;user space;SPM_quot; and ;SPM_quot;kernel space;SPM_quot;