Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!agate!hughes From: hughes@volcano.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Hughes) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer Subject: Re: fork() under MS/DOS? Message-ID: Date: 28 Sep 90 18:41:27 GMT References: <10718@life.ai.mit.edu> <69400001@suna2> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: ucb Lines: 25 In-Reply-To: jaswal@suna2.cs.uiuc.edu's message of 18 Sep 90 01:49:00 GMT In article <69400001@suna2> jaswal@suna2.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >Windows does non-preemptive scheduling, meaning that >concurrent tasks must voluntarily give up control of the processor >before other tasks get a time slice. (I'm not positive of this.) >This may have changed with Windows v3.0 or when running on a 286 >or 386. From _Microsoft Windows: a guide to Programming_, page 1-16 (this book is from Microsoft Press and include version 3): "1.6 Tips for Writing Windows Applications ... "Do not take exclusive control of the CPU--it is a shared resource. Although Windows is a multitasking system, it is non-preemptive. This means it cannot take control back from an application until the application releases it. A cooperative application carefully manages access to the CPU and gives other applications ample opportunity to execute." "Cooperative application" is _such_ newspeak. Eric Hughes hughes@ocf.berkeley.edu