Tzvetan Mikov (tmikov@gmail.com) on 5/8/06 wrote:
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>Both of these are related to implementing user mode APIs and seem orthogonal to
>the whole microkernel issue. Why would they imply a microkernel-like design in one case and not in the other ?
>

That's right. A traditional microkernel has little more
than scheduler and interrupt handler running in kernel mode.

One might be able to say a kernel is a hybrid, or "almost a
microkernel", if it has a select few more things as part of
the monolithic kernel (eg. memory allocator); or if its
services run in kernel space, but could _conceptually_ run
in userspace (eg. communicate with message passing).

NT is neither of these. You are correct to say that the
personality layer is irrelevant, because it is the
implementation of the kernel _services_ that matters.