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A lot of OpenBSD mentions here, but what about MINIX 3? It's so underrated and ignored :( They made a nice microkernel-based UNIX-like system with a NetBSD userspace.

Also, Redox is switching to a microkernel architecture...

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re MINIX 3. It's not made for high-security. It's about high-reliability. Safety is usually a precursor to security but security can take a lot more. The core has to be designed for it like Genode is doing.

re Redox. It's a nice project I've praised before. It's an alpha work-in-progress, changing rapidly, and unclear how much of its design is truly for security. A trimmed OpenBSD is probably a safer bet than it so far given the staggering amount of review that went into it. Rust's features and a microkernel only prevent so many kinds of problems.

For the uninformed, what problems would Rust's features and microkernel not protect against?

I can't even remember for Rust. I just know Rust team here admitted there was a cut-off point in terms of safety features it provides like any other language. For microkernels, all they do is memory isolation plus limit kernel-mode damage. Past that, you have to design extra capabilities into the microkernel, trusted code, or apps. You can even have concurrency errors in your apps with those if there's a shared-memory space allowed.

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