History of Kernel

	Revision 7 . . December 7, 2001 11:42 pm by The Anome [Mentioned Windows NT kernel]
	Revision 6 . . December 6, 2001 1:58 am by Dmerrill [link linux kernel no linux]
	Revision 5 . . December 5, 2001 10:51 pm by The Anome [linked to Linux kernel]
	Revision 4 . . (edit) December 5, 2001 10:02 pm by Arcade [*Link corrected]
	Revision 3 . . October 31, 2001 4:16 pm by Alan D [why especially unix? I didn't think unix described implementation, as demonstrated by many varying *nix impls.]

---

Difference (from prior major revision) (no other diffs)

Changed: 3c3

2. The essential part of an operating system. The kernel is generally responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security, and so forth. Some operating systems have a great deal of functionality implemented in the kernel, a monolithic kernel; others have a microkernel which implements only a bare minimum, with the remaining features require small modules? which can be flexibly configured. A monolithic kernel is much faster than a microkernel, though a microkernel can dynamically load and unload modules as needed to reduce resource usage. The Linux kernel is a good example of an open-source operating system kernel.

2. The essential part of an operating system. The kernel is generally responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security, and so forth. Some operating systems have a great deal of functionality implemented in the kernel, a monolithic kernel; others have a microkernel which implements only a bare minimum, with the remaining features require small modules? which can be flexibly configured. A monolithic kernel is much faster than a microkernel, though a microkernel can dynamically load and unload modules as needed to reduce resource usage. The Linux kernel is a good example of an open-source operating monolithic system kernel, the Windows NT kernel is an example of a more layered closed-source kernel design.