[Haskell-cafe] Re: Python's big challenges, Haskell's big advantages?

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Sep 17, at 16:44, Evan Laforge wrote:
>>> The fast context switching part seems orthogonal to me.  Why is it
> that getting the OS involved for context switches kills the
> performance?  Is it that the ghc RTS can switch faster because it
> knows more about the code it's running (i.e. the OS obviously couldn't
> switch on memory allocations like that)?  Or is jumping up to kernel
> space somehow expensive by nature?  And why does the OS need so many

A context switch involving the OS is actually a double (at least)  
context switch:  one to switch to kernel context, another to switch  
back to user context, and (because kernel context switches are  
scheduler entry points) optionally switches to other processes which  
have a higher immediate priority.  These context switches also switch  
considerably more state than a user-mode context switch between green  
threads, which doesn't switch the full process context including the  
set of process page tables, processor access controls, etc.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH