Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!bmerh408!bmerh451!dgraham From: dgraham@bmerh451.bnr.ca (Douglas Graham) Subject: Re: nice for Minix? Message-ID: <1991Mar28.064558.15562@bmerh408.bnr.ca> Sender: news@bmerh408.bnr.ca (Usenet News Admin) Organization: Bell Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada References: <1991Mar20.221512.21591@vicstoy.UUCP> <1991Mar25.093908.13426@rtf.bt.co.uk> Date: Thu, 28 Mar 91 06:45:58 GMT In article go@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU (Gary Oliver) writes: > >Just thought I'd put in a good word for the nice "nice" package submitted >by Kai-Uwe Bloem recently. It works "nice"ly. ... >I'm not certain, but if people would try this, the cry about having a >"threaded" fs may die down. The cry seems to pretty muted these days. Partly because the FAQ goes out of it's way nip such talk in the bud. This is unfortunate, because even if it never got implemented, it would (and did) lead to some interesting discussions on alternate O/S designs. It's too bad that this group doesn't see more of those types of discussions; the type that us lifelong students of O/S design could learn something from. A better scheduler helps, but it's no panacea. It will always seem silly to me that I have to wait to send a character to the console, while the floppy driver waits for a bunch of interrupts. It's not likely to get any better when I finally get around to writing the tape driver that I so badly need. >The package is a much simpler way to >get most of the performance asked for and it is in keeping with the >spirit of Minix : simple and effective. Is Minix really all that simple? Maybe it's just me, but I find that some of the task interactions are really quite complicated and convoluted. A non preemptable passive kernel, with many equivalent user processes vying for resources seems to me to be a more understandable model. But like the FAQ sez, if you want it, do it yourself... > It's a pretty classical >implementation of process priorities with queue pre-emption and >should, at least, be representative of topics discussed in any >OS class worth taking. Yup, along with virtual memory, disk scheduling algorithms, discussions on maximizing throughput... --- Doug Graham dgraham@bnr.ca Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa Ontario Canada