Multitasking - Was [Gllug] Sun hardware/firewall memory

[Ian Norton-Badrul]

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Robert Newson wrote:
| AFAIK, there are basically 2 types of multi-tasking: pre-emeptive and
| co-operative.  I think (in basic terms), in prememptive, the system
| interrupts the task after a given time slice and then uses a scheduling
| scheme to decide which task gets the next time slice (2 main versions of
| that: highest accumulated priority and round-robin); whereas in
| cooperative the system gives control over to a task and its upto that
| task to relinquish control back to the system which will then decide
| which task to [continue to] run.
|
| The biggest problem with co-operative is that a task can hog the
| processor and/or if it crashes the system could go belly up.
|
| AFAIK, *nix uses pre-emptive whereas Windows uses co-operative.

Win9x/Mx are totally co-op multitasking systems,

I think since NT4 that some parts of the kernel will still task-switch,
but not much of it, the rest of the luser space stuff + device drivers
afaik run co-operativly.

Just incase anyone wanted to know, the first time I ever saw pre-emtpive
multitasking was when I used my Atari :-)

MultiTOS - (very buggy co-operative multitasking) - Based on MiNT (Mint
is Not TOS) to be honest a total mess you couldnt use for _ANY_ work

MagiC - Co-operative multitasking, a bit of a windows (commercial) feel
to it, but very fast (GEMDOS and VDI routines were written in 68k
instead of C). it was fairly cool but has suffered the atari commercial
closed source death that many things have done. It looked nice, and
brought my falcon quite a nice desktop that reminded me of MacOS 9.

MiNT - (post 1993 versions) MINT Is Now TOS. Very nice UNIX/TOS hybrid,
all the joys of unix and still you can play time-bandit :-),
(pre-emtpive multitasking) (you can also run X in this too!)

MiNT is still being developed, and there is a nice Debian GNU/MiNT
project :-)

Ian <bredroll at atari.org>

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