Re: We have a whole new ton of goodies to investigate...

[u-vpoa@aetey.se]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 11:53:27AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> restructured so that the wakeup intelligence is in the waker not the
> sleeper (which is more efficient anyway)
> 
> ie you avoid the plague of what is effectively
> 
> 		while(!i_am_ready()) {
> 	                sleep_on(&foo);
> 		}
> 
> type stuff in the big Linux kernel and instead of waking one queue you
> end up doing
> 
> 		foreach(task_waiting_foo) {
> 			if (task_is_ready(task))
> 				wakeup(task);
> 		}
> 
> in the context of the waker.

I see.

> More seriously though what do you need to find extra space to add ? The
> network stack needs work but is mostly out of kernel mapping (and
> probably should stay so as with 2.11BSD), the rest of the basic POSIX

Sure.

> infrastructure is pretty complete. The Linux kernel has grown over ten
> times bigger since 1.2 days but I don't think it's added that much useful
> to the core code.

One extra thing I would appreciate in the kernel is of course the support
for code segment switching, making several-times-64k code sizes practical.

(Also there is always a desire for support of additional hardware,
this can easily push the limits both for the code and the data, if not
putting the drivers into different address spaces or strictly limiting
the number of simultaneously usable drivers)

This aside, do you say that the ELKS kernel is pretty much complete
nowadays, and that it is only user space which needs fixing to make the
system usable?

Rl