4 ms·

Is there an SMP version of the 386? You may need locks on a non-SMP system (since you can still have concurrency), but without parallelism you don't need atomi

• tremon 4y ago
  The 386 still has hardware and software interrupts which might just happen between the load and store instructions, so it's not as simple as "we don't need atomics". If you were writing code specifically for the 386, I suppose you could implement all semaphores as critical sections to guard against external interrupts; I see no reason why that wouldn't work. But realistically, that code would be more of a museum piece than something you'd want to maintain in a 2022 operating system.
  • xxpor 4y ago
    Ah interrupts, of course. /me goes back to his polling-only application :) (we have an interrupt, but it's "the watchdog fired and you're about to die anyway", so not exactly complex to handle...)
• my123 4y ago
  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190404-00/?p=102383 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190404-00/?p=10...
  • xxpor 4y ago
    of COURSE there's a Raymond Chen blog post about this :D