Re: My 66000 and High word facility

On 8/19/2024 11:05 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

Task swapping time is way down in the noise. It’s reloading the L1 and L2
cache that swamps the time. 64 registers is nothing compared to 32k or
megabytes.

 Depends on the kind of swap.  If you're thinking of time-sharing
preemption, then indeed context switch time is not important.
 But when considering communication between processes, then very fast
context switch times allow for finer grain divisions, like
micro-kernels.
 Historically, these things have never really materialized, admittedly.
 

FWIW: One of the things that led me to the temptation to consider register banks, was not "ye olde preemptive task scheduling", but rather the relatively higher cost of performing COM-like method calls between one task and another.
Theoretically, with 4 banks:
   Task 1, Task 2, Kernel / Syscall, Interrupt
The caller could be put in Task 1 and the called task in Task 2.
...

          Stefan