>hardware multitasking The main reason this wasn't used more is that is isn't a good fit for what an OS needs to do. Jumping to a TSS or task gate saves the c

>hardware multitasking The main reason this wasn't used more is that is isn't a good fit for what an OS needs to do. Jumping to a TSS or task gate saves the current context and restores that for the new task, in one atomic operation. But most kernels save the registers on syscall/interrupt entry (while remaining in the context of the current task), and restore a possibly different context on exit when the current one gets suspended. There is no way to do "half of a task switch" with the TSS mechanism, so it would always do useless work: kernel code does: push user registers handle syscall / interrupt select new task and jump to it CPU does: save context A (mostly garbage values at this point) restore context B (containing previously saved garbage) kernel code does: pop user registers return to ring 3