[Arryn]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
Last time I heard, (true) microkernels have a 20% performance hit (according to Tannenbaum as far as I recall)

Esben: One of my biggest beefs with MS is that they have always favored performance over stability (hence allowing drivers and apps to run at the same level as the kernel). What good is software that loads a second or two faster if you never know when it'll crash your system?

Sheap: when did Intel switch from 4-ring to 2? I haven't followed CPU hardware all that closely in a number of years. The 386 processors had 4 rings, and I believe the 486s as well.



The basic problem is that MS OSes never used more than 0 and 3 (sticking what should have been in 1 & 2 in 0 where it shouldn't have been), so I presume that Intel (who was in partnership with MS for quite a while) eventually gave up the idea in order to simplify their designs if MS wasn't going to use the feature.