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Comment by aortega | Hacker News Reader

Great! except that to be called a kernel it's missing just a process manager, memory manager, filesystem, process separation and hardware abstraction. Yeah I'm that guy, down vote me as you wish, the article is still wrong.

It's a way to load a ring-0 application into grub. Pretty cool, but not a kernel.

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It's a statically linked program, real memory, diskless system, kernel-mode-only kernel without too much fluff in the video i/o abstraction.

Kernel means "core". Kernel-mode-only kernel is a contradiction. If you don't have separate parts, you can't have a core.

So if you write core software for an architecture without privsep you must not call it a kernel?

I'm not talking about privsep, just different modules. I gonna answer you with another question:

Did MS-DOS had a kernel?

Yes. We all lose here today.

It depends. Being downvoted by people that believes a memcpy() is a kernel, is victory.

Is Super Mario Bros. a kernel? Every NES, Game Boy, Sega Genesis, etc... game ran on the "bare metal" without anything resembling an OS (or even a BIOS, really).

The start of an extreme microkernel. Just add messaging, a little memory work, processes and the rest can be possibly done in user mode!

I agree, it's like a microkernel, you only have to add a microkernel.

There are plenty of kernels which don't do most of the things you mentioned.

They are called libraries.

Or embedded systems. YMMV.

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