Talk:PCLSRing

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Worse is better

I understand the concept worse is better. Can someone explain why the Unix way is worse but better?--Improfane (talk) 20:16, 21 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't it straightforward? RPG explains it, but the gist is pretty clear:

"Contrast this with the approach taken in the UNIX operating system, where there is restartability, but it is not transparent. Instead, an I/O operation returns the number of bytes actually transferred (or the EINTR error if the operation was interrupted before any bytes were actually transferred), and it is up to the application to check this and manage its own resumption of the operation until all the bytes have been transferred."

Restartability is usually the right thing, and it can be handled just fine by the OS; but Unix forces each and every app that wants it to handle it itself (in contravention of DRY). This is better for the OS, but worse for the apps - but favoring the OS over apps, though globally inefficient ('worse'), may give it an evolutionary edge ('better'). --Gwern (contribs) 14:05 14 September 2009 (GMT)

I don't understand

This statement is not clear to me and as a result I cannot improve it:

"Process B tries to interact with access Process A" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.226.137.108 (talk) 14:07, 8 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

But why?

"but ITS enforces the appearance that system calls are not visible to other processes"

This statement occurs, in some form or other, in every description of this issue that I can find. But I don't understand the rationale. I concede that if you start off from this premise then you have to do complicated things to implement it, but why start with that assumption?

Either I never really understood the operating systems I have used, or they never had to deal with this in the first place. Mostly I dealt with systems with asynchronous packet-driven I/O - but there were still cases where you could observe another process waiting in kernel mode. Is lack of kernel-mode preemption a big factor? Lack of per-process kernel stack?