Comment by harry8
5 days ago
> ...buy us anything.
Totally depends on who "us" and isn't. What problem is being solved etc. In the aggregate clearly the trade off has been beneficial to the most people. If what you want to do got traded, well you can still dream.
Right, but that was kind of my question? What is better about not having a lot of these things?
That is, phrasing it as a dream makes it sound like you imagine it would be better somehow. What would be better?
Think about using a modern x86-64 cpu core to run one process with no operating system. Know exactly what is in cache memory. Know exactly what deadlines you can meet and guarantee that.
It's quite a different thing to running a general purpose OS to multiplex each core with multiple processes and a hardware walked page table, TLB etc.
Obviously you know what you prefer for your laptop.
As we get more and more cores perhaps the system designs that have evolved may head back toward that simplicity somewhat? Anything above %x cpu usage gets its own isolated, un-interrupted core(s)? Uses low cost IPC? Hard to speculate with any real confidence.
I just don't know that I see it running any better for the vast majority of processes that I could imagine running on it. Was literally just transcoding some video, playing a podcast, and browsing the web. Would this be any better?
I think that is largely my qualm with the dream. The only way this really works is if we had never gone with preemptive multitasking, it seems? And that just doesn't seem like a win.
You do have me curious to know if things really do automatically pin to a cpu if it is above a threshold. I know that was talked of some, did we actually start doing that?
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Things would be simpler, more predictable and tractable.
For example, real-time guarantees (hard time constraints on how long a particular type of event will take to process) would be easier to provide.
But why do we think that? The complexity would almost certainly still exist. Would just now be up a layer. With no guarantees that you could hit the same performance characteristics that we are able to hit today.
Put another way, if that would truly be a better place, what is stopping people from building it today?
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