🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr16.231453.25321@cs.ubc.ca> sritchie@cs.ubc.ca (Stuart  
Ritchie) writes:
> I speculate that special purpose onboard processors like the DSP
> will give way to fast and inexpensive general purpose processors.
> The DSP is an intermediate stage until we get a general purpose
> CPU that can do everything.

I truly hope this is the case, however, people have been saying this for some  
time now (since the early 80's) and it still hasn't come to pass.  Seems that  
as soon as the technology exists to speed up a general purpose processor, it is  
applied to DSP's as well.  So, the DSP always keeps its edge for what it is  
supposed to do.

What would be even more enabling would be for Mach to have real-time scheduling  
algorithms that would allow real-time tasks to be scheduled on some set of  
processors (maybe one) and then let the non real-time stuff duke it out on  
whatever is left.  At least give people the option to run in this way.

This way, you could use rate monotonic analysis to help set the priorities on  
the real-time tasks and then let Mach handle the scheduling.  This would be  
truly cool.

..eric