"A microkernel is a minimal computer operating system kernel which, in its purest form, provides no operating-system services at all, only the mechanisms needed to implement such services, such as low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC). If the microkernel has a kernelmode-usermode distinction, the microkernel is the only part of the system executing in a kernel mode. The actual operating-system services are provided by "user-mode" servers. These include device drivers, protocol stacks, file systems and user-interface code..."