In message <43F9F1C0.7040100@netphreax.net>, "Thomas E. Spanjaard" writes:

>
>If this happens, I'd like to go the whole nine yards and put all this in 
>separate VM spaces. In other words, go the microkernel way, as that's 
>where this is headed. Any objections regarding performance loss, well, 
>look at L4. If the kernel itself (and VMM) go in *that* direction, 
performance will be of no issue (or even more academic, put everything 
>in the same VM space, but limit the memory mappings processes/modules 
>have, and not have to worry about many heavy context switches). Of 
>course, this is a very long way to go, and I doubt if many like it.
>
That's a much larger arechitectural change, and I think there are 
serious performance questions.  It would be nice, but I don't think it
will work well enough.  That said, there's only one way to find out...
(Personally, I don't think there's that much benefit to NetBSD from 
doing that for device drivers.  File systems, on the other hand...)

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb