this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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To answer your post title question, I suspect that at this point it seems counterintuitive to introduce complexity in an environment already rife with exploits.
It's not like it's a new idea either. Microsoft published research on this in 2009, 16 years ago.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-multikernel-a-new-os-architecture-for-scalable-multicore-systems/
The abstract on that link holds the promise of many benefits, but it appears to carefully avoid specific claims, which makes me wonder if the idea ran into unexpected hurdles, which is common in software development.
The abandonment of the Barrelfish project is probably an indicator that this is an idea that didn't pan out.
Having said that, I haven't dug into kernel development over the past 40 years of my career, so it might well be that aspects and nuances of this idea were adopted and are in common use.