Good day fellow Rob,
I would like to know which OS has a more advanced kernel. And can you explain why in layman's terms ?
Since both kernels represent decades of major human life investments, any quick reply you receive (less than about a million pages, that is) has gotta be full of broad-strokes. Yet I figure you're asking the question for fun (a worthy reason), so here's my for-fun reply.
I gather from your comment about CPU and memory limits that you may be interested in which kernel handles big computers better. Practically speaking, both kernels are kept up to date in this area, to the extend that they'll run computers with price tags out of the reach of any normal individual. And a comparison between these systems quickly yields differences much more likely to determine a person's choice than their support for big computers: open source vs closed source and precedence (people continuing to use what they already know about, including applications) being the top two.
As
SirDice mentioned, the Windows kernel's a hybrid between the microkernel and monolithic kernel designs. FreeBSD's kernel's monolithic. The microkernel idea's to run as much code as possible in protected mode, so that bugs in things like device drivers can crash the drivers, but can't crash the whole operating system. But when stuff's pulled out of the kernel like that, it still has to talk to the kernel, and letting the two talk to each other safely's complex. The microkernel thing's fancier so a lot of people would call it more "advanced," yet in the real world, its benefits haven't played out in any important way. Your average user and even a lot of really technical users don't have reason to care whether they're using a microkernel, monolithic or hybrid kernel. And which design's better's a highly debatable thing.
Two big advantageous things in the FreeBSD kernel (that I like) that aren't in the Windows kernel are support for ZFS and jails. Windows has been trying to play catch-up to ZFS with ReFS, but it's a very new thing in Windows-land and lacks a lot of ZFS features. Now jails--the Windows kernel doesn't have anything like that, at least that's been coded out in to a practical, usable feature. I can take a low-power, Atom-based computer and run fifty FreeBSD jails on it. Each one's going to smell like a separate FreeBSD host over the network, and one can be relatively well assured that whatever's running in one jail won't leak over in to another; they're kept separate fairly well. Now, you take this same computer, and put Windows on it, and see how many Windows instances you can run with Hyper-V--you'll be lucky to get two or three running, and when one starts to lose its mind or get infected somehow, there'll be no easy, safe way to peer in to it and see what's going on, because it lacks the "one-way mirror" trait that jails have.
If you feel like narrowing your question down to a more specific area, you might get more replies that you'd have fun reading.
