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You can even call Windows/386 or 3.x "hybrid", and in my opinion it would be more accurate to call Windows/386 a hybrid kernel than calling NT one. There's a microkernel that manages VMs, and there is a traditional, larger kernel inside each VM (either Windows itself, or DOS). The microkernel also arbitrates hardware between each of the VMs, but it is the VMs themselves that contain most of the drivers, which are running in "user space"!

In comparison Windows NT is basically a monolithic kernel. Everything runs in the same address space, so there's 0 protection. Or at least, in any definition where you call NT a hybrid kernel then practically any modular kernel would be hybrid. In later versions of NT the separations between kernel-mode components this post is praising have almost completely disappeared and even the GUI is running in kernel mode...



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