Right. A multiprocessor system would behave similarly. But in a multiprocessor-oriented system, the processes would be making far fewer calls to the kernal... a kernal that has nothing to do but service those infrequent calls.
Take the huge GUI, the Taiwanese device drivers, the interrupt handlers, all that dangerous stuff out of the OS kernal. A lot of that can even be removed on uniprocessor systems.
John
OK, define the kernal as the chunk of code that sets up processes, starts them, checks them for health, and kills them. It probably sets up memory management and disk quotas, although it could even delegate that to another processor. Remove the GUI, the drivers, most of the interrupt handlers, the file systems, the comm stacks. The number of system calls into this code is tiny compared to what Windows or even Linux has to handle. Move all that other traditional "OS" stuff into
50 or 60 other processors that can't take down the system and don't need to be context switched.That's what I'm trying to get you to think about.
John
Ooh Archie. Look at the anger you're releasing here. I can imagine your brow furrowing; your face getting redder and redder; your pulse quickening as your heart struggles to pump that vital fluid through you immensely obese body. You make Jabba the Hutt look like a Jenny Craig success story.
Calm down little tyke. It's not healthy for you to get so angry. You need to vent your pent-up emotions. There have been reports in the medical literature that illustrate conclusively that blacks are far more susceptable to heart attacks and/or strokes when stress levels rise uncontrolled as yours are now. Take a break from your computer and go pop a cap into the towelhead at your nearest 7-11. Then come back relaxed and calm for more conversation.
More and more red, you retarded f*****ad.
When your mentality actually exceeds that of a twelve year old retarded twit, you may actually get folks here to do something more with you other than setting you up in their kill filters.
Written by engineers!
John
Of course the GPL gives them every reason not to want to do that.
-- Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:>WIN | A better way to focus the sun The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see You lose and Bill collects. |
Running multiple CPU intensive processes worked just fine on 80486s the only difference now is that the processes run faster and the boxes with multiple processors usually have them all inside the same chip instead of in several chips. I recall using a machine that had 32 80486DX50s in it - for it's day that was a blisteringly fast machine - that machine was quite good at running a lot of CPU intensive tasks at once.
I assume she's a software type. Such a person has no need to be "current" (pun!) on a very obscure logic level convention.
Tell us more about CML... or is that just another buzzword that you've overheard?
John
Cell is a good idea, but it's a lot different from having a lot of full-function processors on one chip, surrounding a central cache. I think the latter architecture will "win", because it's more culturally acceptable to the current gang of programmers; they can run their favorite C++ monster apps on any core.
In fact, the industry will probably migrate to dedicated-core OS systems, merely by having some people partition their 64-CPU linux systems that way, and appreciate its benefits.
So multicore may be the biggest threat to Microsoft since Google.
John
ray
Just a screwy question, how many processors does your monitor support?
reality.
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Not only that, it is still in the idle loop well over 95% of the time. Who needs more idle cores?
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I think you missed my irony.
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Only one thing is reasonably likely, multicore processors will shove parallelism down researchers and programmers throats.
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The Asian version is the soroban and the indoeuropean version (made famous in the Hellenic era) is the abacus. Are you thinking biquinary or raw decimal?
Speed scaling has slowed to a crawl; the GHz race is mostly over. Lithography has a ways to go yet, so higher-end chips will be multicore. Keeping them all busy is a separate issue from how an OS is partitioned.
I'm guessing that you couldn't run all 64 or 256 or whatever cores compute-bound without toasting the silicon anyhow. Given that, if we do get many-core chips, the only use for all those cores is to restructure the OS.
Geez, doesn't anybody have ideas?
John
I make the opposite argument. Applications needn't be parallelized across multiple processors, they each need to own a single processor.
Of course, some apps might use all the cores they can get - games, Spice, 3D modeling, FFTs - but lots of apps would be happy to have a 2 GHz CPU all to themselves.
Isn't parallelism already one of the darlings of CS?
John
And it was. Which says more about its predecessors than about XP.
do that.
Well, I'm not exactly expressing dismay over the lack.
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Already have it. Just too much real work to play right now. Been working on an intermittant VMware Virtual Center problem on our new datacenter.
Playing with desktop stuff is for when I'm not too busy.
I assume that comment's not meant for me.
Bill
What was that box a Sequent varient?
Bill
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