Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
>
>This particular lunatic here thinks context switches need not be
>Nemesis, if the amount of context pushed can be minimized (hardware
>stack machines!), and if you use several copies of hardware which
>retain state, and only push around the one bit which flags the
>individual engines as currently active. Only doable as MISC, of
>course, where a CPU core is worth ~10 kTransistors.
But the bits that make context switches expensive aren't in the CPU
core! The main cost comes from reprogramming the MMU and invalidating
the level-1 cache.
Tony.
-- f.a.n.finch fanf@covalent.net dot@dotat.at "Dead! And yet there he stands!"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:17:56 PDT