[Vm-dev] Suspend

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Wed Jul 18 19:15:13 UTC 2007


While the subject is in the air, perhaps it would be worth  
considering what the ideal situation would be.

For example, I would suggest we might drop the idea of a suspend-for- 
a-fixed-time and have a suspend until next alarm. That would be  
called by the background process when nothing else wants time and  
would suspend the vm until the time specified by the timer queue;  
perhaps some emergency backstop value might be used in case some  
twerp gets us into a state with no timer active and no Process doing  
anything. That ought to remove the problem of looping on a tiny  
delay, though if certain OSs can't sleep for very short periods I  
have no idea how they can do much at that point.

OSs that have suitable asynchronous or interrupt driven input stuff  
can trigger the return from the suspend at need. OSs that don't (the  
only one I know of is RISC OS right now and I'll almost certainly be  
retiring from maintaining that soon) can probably set some vm- 
internal polling.

I'm sure it would require some changes in the image to make this work  
properly but so what. Older images can run on older vms.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Shift to the left!  Shift to the right!  Pop up, push down, byte,  
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