On Thursday 15 March 2007 03:13:01 pm James Knott wrote:
M Harris wrote:
On Thursday 15 March 2007 11:21, Randall R Schulz wrote:
It does do user-level preemptive multitasking but not kernel level.
Perhaps you're drawing some real distinction here, but I'm not sure what it is.
The distinction (which I am now re-researching) is that there is a difference between preemptable and interruptable. Interrupt driven is not precisely the same thing as preemptive from a scheduler standpoint--- dispatching based on interrupts vs dispatching based on master scheduling and time-slice. Windoze (at least in my experience) does not seem to faithfully schedule kernel processes according to true preemptive scheduling... seems like the kernel gets preferential treatment and often the entire system resource is hogged by the kernel at the expense of user space.
I have to go back now and restudy this... but I am thinking that Kai is correct... NT didn't have it right..... and it sure didn't match up with OS/2 or the 2.0.36 kernel (linux at the time).
Windows has never been able to multi-task as well as OS/2 or Linux. I recall demonstrating how with OS/2 you could actually do something else, while formatting a floppy!
I think I've written it on this list before. Back in my early career we ran a shop which sold a POS system based on DOS or OS/2 and Novell (there's the on topic portion) as the backend. I distinctly remember getting in the new copy of Windows 95 and wondering how much "better" it was than NT or OS/2. (We had been running 2.0 but recently had adopted Warp.) We setup side by side computers of identical configuration - IBM PS/2 systems running DX/40 chips with 16MB RAM each. We loaded one with Win95 and the other with Warp. We then setup some tasks - formatting a floppy, compiling our app (which ran under DataFlex), searching for files and something else. We set each machine to run at about the same time. The OS/2 machine finished all tasks in about two minutes. The Win95 machine finished in half an hour. It was amazing. -- k -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org