> "real micro kernel based OS based on a message passing core", and they too, by almost any metric, have been a failure.
BeOS wasn't half bad. The failure was probably mostly commercial. It is true that they moved their networking stack into the kernel, but it's not entirely clear to me that they had to do that, it was just the most expedient way to get acceptable performance and stability given the (programmer-time) resourcing constraints of the project.
> BeOS wasn't half bad. The failure was probably mostly commercial.
Fair point. You could probably say this of other attempted microkernels too, to be even fairer. But that doesn't really change the fundamental point that just cooking up "a better OS design" doesn't lead to it being successful. There's a lot more in play that "mere quality".
well if that sort of "successful" is your key metric, this is true for a lot of things and has been known since biblical times: "a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it"
Depends on your definition of microkernel. Maybe it wasn't pure, but It was in many ways closer to a microkernel than a monolith; sure the filesystem ran in ring 0, but it was scheduled onto its own threads by the scheduler just like any other process.
BeOS wasn't half bad. The failure was probably mostly commercial. It is true that they moved their networking stack into the kernel, but it's not entirely clear to me that they had to do that, it was just the most expedient way to get acceptable performance and stability given the (programmer-time) resourcing constraints of the project.