Re: Privilege Levels Below User

I think, Eric more than a little exaggerates about the level of
complexity of end-of-interrupt processing needed in common case.
May be, the code is long, but absolute majority of it is executed very
rarely, if at all.

Possibly, as I do have a tendency to get somewhat animated about this.
I can't find it just now but a while back I was looking at some
Linux source code for the x86 interrupt return path,
and it went on for page after page after page.

Beside the code size cost and associated runtime impact, there's also
the fact that this complexity inevitably comes with an increased risk
of bugs.

Nick McLaren could go on and on about this as an infinite source of bugs
that are so hard to track down that they're basically never even
diagnosed correctly (let alone fixed).


        Stefan