A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Sean Kelly]

David B. Held wrote:
> 
> That being said, I think it would be *particularly* clever of you to use 
> your start-from-scratch kernel to explore new ideas in multi-processing 
> and massive multithreading, but this would imply having decent multi-CPU 
> hardware to play with.  Most of the OS support we have is decades old 
> technology hacked together to keep up with the hardware, but maybe you 
> have an opportunity to do it right from the start.  That is, to create a 
> kernel where multiprocessing is as fundamental as memory management or 
> process scheduling.  We try to write lock-free algorithms using just one 
> special assembly instruction, and look how far we have to bend over 
> backwards to make it work.  If an MP-friendly kernel gave us more 
> primitives than CAS, because it was designed that way from the start 
> (meaning, the process scheduler was hacked up in a new way), I suspect 
> that you could make MP a lot easier on users.  Just some stuff to think 
> about...

Great idea :-)  BeOS had very good multithreaded performance, but it 
didn't offer a new way to write multithreaded code.  If such a beast 
existed, I'd definitely be interested in playing with it.


Sean