Thanks for the pointers. I have heard of QnX through a book about message-based programming with SIMPL. SIMPL I think borrows the QnX APIs for making modular and networked systems.
I prefer open source so I've been taking a look at Minix 3. It seems really cool. And it's only 6 or so years old -- at the time of the argument Minix wasn't meant to be a production system, but now it is.
I feel like it must be easier to trace application performance with Minix since you have natural points to insert hooks. With monolithic kernels it's hard to understand what is really going on.
I see a lot of potential advantages of a microkernel in distributed systems. For example, Amazon EC2 has well known I/O sharing issues. With a microkernel, you could fairly easily reimplement the file server with your own custom disk scheduling logic based on identities (not Unix users) and priorities.
In Linux I know there is some work with containers, but I don't think it is as customizable as you would like.
I prefer open source so I've been taking a look at Minix 3. It seems really cool. And it's only 6 or so years old -- at the time of the argument Minix wasn't meant to be a production system, but now it is.
I feel like it must be easier to trace application performance with Minix since you have natural points to insert hooks. With monolithic kernels it's hard to understand what is really going on.
I see a lot of potential advantages of a microkernel in distributed systems. For example, Amazon EC2 has well known I/O sharing issues. With a microkernel, you could fairly easily reimplement the file server with your own custom disk scheduling logic based on identities (not Unix users) and priorities.
In Linux I know there is some work with containers, but I don't think it is as customizable as you would like.