![]() I know macOS also uses dynamic kernel modules, but I'm not as familiar with that system. This means unloading and reloading kernel modules at runtime (or boot) is very easy so as long as you don't crash or hang the system, you can keep reloading drivers as much as you like without rebooting. Haiku, on the other hand, has a rather small (2.2MB binary on i386) kernel with no drivers built in at all (not even PCI) and loads all its drivers as relocateable shared-objects. The Linux kernel is mostly "statically" linked (there is DKMS but it isn't so widely used) with most major systems in the "kernel" itself, and something similar is true in the FreeBSD world. "Modular" refers to linkage and overall design. ![]() If instead each driver is its own process with address space, and calls into the kernel via syscalls like any other process, then it is a microkernel. if drivers live in the kernel address space, can read/write all kernel memory, call functions in other drivers, etc., then it's a monolithic kernel. "Monolithic" refers more to the way drivers and the kernel interact, i.e. Much less any of the embedded/RTOS world. No interesting small systems OS: OS/2, classic MacOS, OS-9, much less the Windows NT family. Nothing for the really interesting Lisp or Smalltalk machines, the Perq or the Mesa/Cedar workstations. No Seven Dwarfs OS (DEC VMS, Burroughs B-series, DG Nova, CDC NOS, etc.). There's no IBM large system OS (e.g VM/370->z/OS, VM/CMS, TPF). ![]() Now.to be fair.this leaves out a lot of really valuable OS knowledge. For me, in the mists of the old days, learning Unix V6 out of the Lyons books (very slim volumes of annotation.wonderful stuff) make it easy to understand what was going on in V7, which made 4.2BSD and progeny accessible, which made SVR somewhat weird and different, but still conceptually understandable, which made most everything Unix-ish afterword (including Linux) something you still had the vernacular to understand. Start with something where you can substantially wrap your head around the whole thing, like XV6 or Minix, and it's vastly easier to look at chucks of something like Linux and see "oh, this fits into the mental picture here". ![]()
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