Just some initial thoughts

[Fare Rideau]

>: Maneesh

> I hope I'm not overstepping my rights of expression as I am new,
No one here has any more rights than the others:
CODE makes Right, and there's no code yet.

As for code, well, several people (among whom myself) have proposed
to write an initial kernel for either the i386 or OTOP,
but nothing has emerged yet. Discussion welcome on tunes-lll,
and as contributions to the pages.

> I have a little piece of 80386 asm, for a parallel processing safe
> linked list add item/remove item primitive, that (I think) is pretty
> efficient.  I've always wanted to get it checked out to make sure the
> algorithm works and opinions on it, now it wasn't brain surgery, but I
> did derive it myself, but unfortunaltey I couldn't test it (I have but a
> single CPU).
The problem I see with parallel processing is that most code could/should
be broken in modules that interact as little as possible one with the others.
Current compiler technology priviledges monolithic program design.
I'd like to promote modular design, with a higher-order concurrent model
(see "actor" based designs). It would be the task of the back-end
optimizers to "merge" conceptually fine-grained objects that are tightly
interacting into a set of efficient monolithic processes (one per processor).
This allows for a cleaner design, with replaceable components,
and better scalability to a wide variety of platforms.

To sum up: parallelism should be deep inside the programming model;
and efficiency would be granted through meta-programming.
Let this long-term opinion not prevent anyone from coding.


> I have some suggestion as for the use/disuse of selectors, TSS's,
> privlege levels and the like for an Intel specific implimentation.  Are
> we ready to discuss such things, or are we already past that?
Yes, we're ready to discuss it, on the tunes-lll mailing list.

Regards,
-- #f