Interestingly, it appears as if all of Microsoft Research's OS prototypes are based on microkernels. Because these architectures are shared-nothing between processes, they scale very well with multiple cores (as the author points out). Furthermore, they're inherently more stable and have 'self-healing' properties (i.e. they can restart crashed processes; even device drivers). But all of these benefits come at a performance cost because of the message-passing overhead. Singularity and I think Midori try to mitigate this by a concept called software isolated processes (SIPs). There's a lot of brilliant and unique work coming out of Microsoft research if you ask me; they're not just implementing a bunch of Minix clones in their microkernel work.
Interestingly, it appears as if all of Microsoft Research's OS prototypes are based on microkernels. Because these architectures are shared-nothing between processes, they scale very well with multiple cores (as the author points out). Furthermore, they're inherently more stable and have 'self-healing' properties (i.e. they can restart crashed processes; even device drivers). But all of these benefits come at a performance cost because of the message-passing overhead. Singularity and I think Midori try to mitigate this by a concept called software isolated processes (SIPs). There's a lot of brilliant and unique work coming out of Microsoft research if you ask me; they're not just implementing a bunch of Minix clones in their microkernel work.