Comment by tptacek
1 day ago
"The role of the operating system" is whatever we decide it is. The operating system exists to serve applications, not the other way around. This isn't an aesthetic thing; it's an engineering choice. Moving parts (or all) of the networking stack into userland is often better engineering, for the reasons I just supplied, any of which I'm happy to go further into.
It's "better" for the application, but not necessarily better for the whole system, or the users. I'm sure it makes perfect sense from the (selfish) application developer point of view, but it goes against the philosophy that defines the roles of the OS vs. the applications.
That's not engineering, that's just religion.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Archit...