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Comment by arp242

3 days ago

Can I run Firefox or PostgreSQL with reasonable performance on SeL4, OKL4, or QNX?

SeL4 was not built for multiple CPU cores, it's not going to perform with modern day "high end" hardware and last I looked its formal proofs don't apply to multicore systems.

Reasonable performance includes GPU acceleration for both rendering and decoding media, right?

  • Not necessarily; short-comings or "TODO"s are okay. I just want to know if I can run actual real-world complex applications on these micro-kernels, and what the trade-offs are (if any). Firefox on OpenBSD has fairly reasonable performance, but is quite a lot slower than on Linux. It's a perfectly reasonable trade-off, but you do need to be aware of it.

    I've asked this question a few times over the last few years when people bring up "we must use microkernel now! They already exist!"-type posts, and thus far the response has either been crickets or vague hand-waving with microbenchmarks that bear no relation to real-world programs.