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Date:      Mon, 8 Apr 1996 15:10:32 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        hasty@rah.star-gate.com (Amancio Hasty Jr.)
Cc:        roell@blah.a.isar.de, hackers@FreeBSD.org, roell@xinside.com
Subject:   Re: The F_SETOWN problem..
Message-ID:  <199604082210.PAA03116@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <199604081853.LAA02584@rah.star-gate.com> from "Amancio Hasty Jr." at Apr 8, 96 11:53:43 am

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> Now if we had a mechanism like ast delivery in VMS you wouldn't be having
> all this problems. 8)
> 
> I often wonder why the kludgy asynch signal notification was not taken 
> a step further to implement full asynchronous i/o .
> 
> Aside from that tty drivers would have to be split into two parts:
> one to do the i/o at a high priority and the other half to process
> the tty events.

To avoid context switching as a result of anything other than
involuntary timer-based preemption or vlountary call-based
preemption, of course.

Anything else results in you switching address spaces much to
frequently, with the resulting high system overhead.

Hence the joke: "An elephant is a mouse running VMS".

If the events still queued to process quantum, that would be a
different matter, but then what about user space reentry, specifically
AST stacks when multiple AST's fire before a single AST can finish
processing?


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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