Re: Latest stuff

[nick@nsis.cl.nec.co.jp (Gavin Thomas Nicol) writes:]

>That's interesting. Just last night I was thinking about time in VSTa.
>I thought a simple server that maintained the system time would be
>nice. I figured that if it was designed well, it wouldn't even need to
>handle interrupts. This way programs could just open /dev/time, and
>read/write.

The kernel has to know "time"; certain kernel mechanisms (like page
stealing) need such a concept. I prototyped having a time server which
all sleepers would use (i.e., open /dev/time and write "sleep 10"), but
I found that the time server needs a kernel mechanism so close to what
most sleepers could use anyway, that there was little benefit to having
an extra server in the way.

The kernel has thus always had "get time" and "sleep". I merely added
"set time" last night. The code was smaller than the code to read the
time out of the hardware, which was the alternative.

>Great! If I remember correctly, pdmake is fairly limited in what it
>let's you do isn't it? Something like the mid 70's to early 80's unix
>make?

Yes, that's about right. You'll notice that my makefiles tend to
be pretty spartan... the habits of a V7 hacker. :-)

>If this isn't urgent, I'll look into it a little later. (I think I'll
>probably be doing some hacking in that area when I start writing
>MADO).

Not urgent, and actually I was hoping it would be a chance for
one of our newer readers to do some coding.

                                        Andy
Received on Fri Oct 1 08:52:32 1993