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>Under the hood, Minoca contains a powerful driver model between device drivers and the kernel. The idea is that drivers can be written in a forward compatible manner, so kernel level components can be upgraded without requiring a recompilation of all device drivers.

This sounds really smart and it looks great overall <3

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That's the "port driver"+"mini port driver" model of Windows.

Not surprising considering the Minoca founders both worked on the Windows kernel team, according to Linked In. :)

Honestly, the inside looks rindunculously like the NT kernel.

So true. it really is my biggest problem with the monolithic Linux kernel.

There is nothing that prevents a monolithic kernel from using the same model -- no theoretical barrier to it, in any case. Linux doesn't do this because its developers don't want it to.

RHEL/ Centos defines a stable driver ABI, and even has tools that devs can use to check that their binary drivers don't use any symbols outside the ABI.

SUSE does too. As far as I'm aware, most stable distributions use a kABI checker. This is the same reason that Android doesn't have many kernel updates -- because proprietary driver authors don't feel like keeping up to date with kABI changes.

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