Show me another OS that you can undress to the kernel, a console, a file system and a disk driver and then build it all up again without missing a beat.
The kernel processes are actual processes so each of the drivers is fully sandboxed, an error in one bit of code can not cause any other processes to be affected unless you explicitly declare that it should be so (shared memory, for instance) and of course you don't do that.
The reduction of scope alone is worth at least 30 IQ points.
Absolutely rock solid. I built some specialized network devices using QnX and those things ran for a decade+ after first installation. Not a single reboot.
If there is one thing that is testimony to the power of microkernels then it is that one. And that 2011 one was avoidable, imo.
The reduction in scope is really gold, it makes it so much easier just to have a small defined interface per program. It is a bit like Erlang/OTP but with C as the core language, the IPC is so lightweight that it becomes the driver behind all library level isolation. So what in a macrokernel would be a massive monolith with all manner of stuff in the same execution ring turns into a miniscule kernel that just does IPC and scheduling and everything else is a user process, including all of the luxuries that you normally associate with user processes: dumps, debuggers, consoles.
