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  • It was my understanding that the main reason Stallman at FSF pursued Mach was not performance but ease of using a debugger: he could use the debugger to debug Mach servers far more easily than debugging code running in kernel space. Although maybe it was the performance that convinced him this was a viable way to implement. Commented Aug 18, 2010 at 18:47
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    If you really want to see a true microkernel in action, try out QNX. In QNX4, the kernel was only 32 K-bytes, and only handled message passing, CPU scheduling and interrups. All other parts of the QNX OS could be swapped out without shutting down or rebooting the system, and it was extremely robust. At one time there was a window emulator for QNX called Willows that ran windows applications faster than native windows. While this has nothing to do with OS-X per se, QNX proved that microkernels are indeed viable when done right. Commented Aug 31, 2013 at 17:02
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    image no longer available. Commented Sep 1, 2013 at 7:10
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    Image still not available Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 17:56
  • Steve Jobs offered Linus a job in 2000. Linus talks about it here. wired.com/2012/03/mr-linux/all/1 Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 13:30