[coyotos-dev] Activations

[Christopher Nelson]

>
>
> Either those tuples now have things really confused or they helped. Let
> me know which. :-)
>
> Part of my reason for hesitatingMy main reason for hesitating is that
> this is not the *only* possible configuration for an external fault
> handler. It is also possible to configure one as:
>
>   (thrdRegSet, thrdContinuation, thrdSpace, ...)  <- the thread context
>   (extRegSet,  extContinuation,  extSpace, ...)  <- the handler context
>
> That is: a fault handler that runs in a completely independent address
> space. Such a handler shares no elements in common with the managed
> thread of control, and it is truly a "heavyweight" process in the sense
> that you mean.
>
>
> Does any of this help?
>

Yes, I believe that clarifies things quite a lot.  From the beginning I
thought that your reference to external fault handlers was of the kind that
you describe above, in a completely independent address space.  Instead, I
see they are very much like the way in which the spoon kernel implements
interrupt delivery.  I like this method for many reasons.

I was hoping that activations would be much more like coroutines, but I
believe that I also clearly see why using them for fault handling requires
additional resources.  Combined with the critical paths they may be blocking
(or complicating), I no longer feel that they are overwhelmingly compelling.

This opens up a lot more questions in my mind regarding the how of many
things (like DLLs, and executable object mapping) but I'm sure that these
things will become clear in time.  Thank you for taking the time to explain
this to me.

-={C}=-
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/coyotos-dev/attachments/20070523/17ede2a1/attachment.html