Actually no. I mean, the concept of such an bootloader/OS hybrid doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but thats okay. The goal doesn't have to make sense, it's all just for fun anyway. What matters is that the way it's done makes sense.Nutterts wrote:Yeah, the problem is if you write a bootloader... you know what your goal is and you write it to do it's job as efficient as possible. But this is one creation that tries to be an OS and a bootloader but the latter only on a 386+. To complicate things even futher, theres no reason the 32bit OS couldn't be loaded by grub as a multiboot kernel directly. Am I driving you insane yet?
I always considered privilege separation the most important aspect of microkernels.What does a microkernel really mean through the context of PM which has protection mechanisms? It's just a design philosophy
But that can be solved with a (modularised) monolithic kernel as well.And having different kernels for ever little difference in architecture or hardware is just silly.
I still don't really know where to draw the line for RM OSes. Would DOS be a hybrid because some drivers are baked into the kernel and others are loaded as TSRs? I image after being loaded they both work exactly the same way, though (mostly just hooking themselves up as interrupt handlers).