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Date:      Tue, 01 Jan 2002 05:36:13 -0800
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Andrew Reilly <areilly@bigpond.net.au>
Cc:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>, John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>
Subject:   Re: Kernel Thread scheduler
Message-ID:  <3C31BB4D.8F580A4D@mindspring.com>
References:  <20011122012838.V13393@elvis.mu.org> <XFMail.011121233016.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <20011122014109.W13393@elvis.mu.org> <20020101224733.A25053@gurney.reilly.home>

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Andrew Reilly wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 01:41:09AM -0600, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> > Why do we even care?  When was the last time wine was good for
> > anything besideds barely being able to run solitare on FreeBSD
> > anyhow?
> 
> I know that this is a long dead thread, but I'm on holidays now,
> and have time to catch up with the FreeBSD lists...
> 
> Wine is actually very useful (to me) and has been for several
> years.  I run two applications under it that there aren't other
> alternatives for (besides firing up a windows box):

Two comments:

1)	The TSS switch can be lazy-bound, and so a TSS is not
	needed per process (setting a TSS per process would
	have the unfortunate effect of limiting you to 1023
	processes... 1024 - 1 for the kernel).  This is why
	Linux removed the TSS dependency on context switches,
	and why FreeBSD never had it (limit of one 4k page of
	32 bit entries = 1024).  FreeBSD WINE support has
	historically lazy-bound this.

2)	WINE has a terrible historical track record overall;
	I personally blame this on their "percentage entry
	point coverage" calculation, which always fails on
	the Nth call, which is unimplemented, and then claims
	((N-1)/N *100) as the percentage of interface coverage
	when it's a complete statistical lie.

The real question is where is the TSS going to be lazy-bound;
I think it's still OK to do it at the process level, and can't
see an application for threads (any VM86 calls could be thunked
to a single TSS in the kernel for use for VM86, and it's really
not necessary with any modern processors, which have an IRQ
fast path in hardware, anyway, even if it is a poorly documented
one.  See The MindShare Protected Mode book).

-- Terry

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