> A micro-kernel with a clearly defined device driver API would mean that Google could update the kernel and android version, while continuing to let old device drivers work without update.
A monolithic kernel with a clearly defined device driver API would do the same thing. Linux is explicitly not that, of course. Maintaining backwards-compatibility in an API is a non-trivial amount of work regardless of whether the boundary is a network connection, IPC, or function call.
A monolithic kernel with a clearly defined device driver API would do the same thing. Linux is explicitly not that, of course. Maintaining backwards-compatibility in an API is a non-trivial amount of work regardless of whether the boundary is a network connection, IPC, or function call.