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Microkernel, Monolithic-kernel, Operating System

The microkernel system (as opposite to monolithic systems) has been developed for years, with the hope that microkernels could solve the problems of other operating systems. However, the evolution of the microkernel systems did not go as many people expected. Because of faultinesses of design in system structure, the performance of the first generation of microkernel operating systems was disappointing. The overhead of the system was too high to bear for users. However, the second-generation microkernel system uses an improved design architecture that could substantially reduce the overhead in the previous microkernel systems. This project evaluates the system performance of the MINIX3.1.2a with the performance of Linux by using Unixbench system evaluating tool. In this way, it could testify whether the microkernel systems could be more flexible, portable and secure than monolithic operating systems. Unixbench could give sufficient statistics on different capacities of MINIX3 and Linux, such as system call overhead, pipe throughput, arithmetic test and so on. The result illustrates MINIX3 has better performance on Shell Scripts running and Arithmetic test and Linux has better performance on other aspects such as system call overhead, process creation and so on. Furthermore, we provide a more detailed analyze on the microkernel Minix 3 system and propose a method that we could improve the performance of the MINIX3 system.