Re: New context version...

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 03:58 PM 11/6/2001 +0100, David Antos wrote:
>On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 03:05:24PM +0100, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> >
> > Hi Hans,
> >
> > This is unrelated. I got curious and did some searching on the web.  The
> > kapm-idled is a kernel thread that executes the HLT instruction if the 
> kernel
> > has nothing better to do. Reason (sort of correct): the chip consumes less
> > power when executing HLT than when doing nothing ;)
>
>Hi, Taco was faster than me and absolutelly correct. The power saving is not
>the only reason, each Un*x has a process with the lowest possible priority
>which runs when there is nothing to do. Some kind of that behaviour occurs in
>all OSs. One possibility is to execute HLT, another is an infinite loop. 
>HLT is
>prefered as it saves energy and makes CPU cooler.

That's interesting! When I run linux undocked i'll do another test and see 
if there's a priority bug involved.

I just ran a couple of tests with docked linux and the maps test file runs 
in some 3 seconds less that windows, partly because mpost runs smoother 
from within tex under linux [i'm still hoping that fabrice will make this 
nice mpost dll that stays in mem]

Hans
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