Re: Can context switches be faster?

[Chase Venters <chase.venters@clientec.com>]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:

> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 14:25 -0400, John Richard Moser wrote:
> >
> >
> > >   - Does the current code act on these behaviors, or just flush all
> > >     cache regardless?
> >
> > the cache flushing is a per architecture property. On x86, the cache
> > flushing isn't needed; but a TLB flush is. Depending on your hardware
> > that can be expensive as well.
>
> So, that is needed for a full process context switch to another process.
> Is the context switch between threads quicker as it should not need to
> flush the TLB?

Indeed. This is also true for switching from a process to a kernel thread 
and back, because kernel threads don't have their own user-space virtual 
memory; they just live inside the kernel virtual memory mapped into every 
process.

> James

Thanks,
Chase
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