3 ms·
That's an interesting view and one I agree with. Surely if context switch = expensive is common knowledge for a long time in computing, the kernel people and CP
by kldx 3y ago
That's an interesting view and one I agree with. Surely if context switch = expensive is common knowledge for a long time in computing, the kernel people and CPU companies would have tried optimizing it to the fullest, no?
- insanitybit 3y agoSyscalls have gotten quite a lot slower after Specter/Meltdown mitigations. Though I suspect that if you're writing a web service that wants TPC you should just disable these - I've told that to Scylla Cloud before, they have no reason to keep them enabled and plenty of reasons to disable them. The other thing is 'io_uring', which is trying to come at the problem by removing context switching altogether by providing a cheap primitive for communicating with the kernel.
- kldx 3y agoSadly io_uring has its share of vulnerabilities as well
- insanitybit 3y agoOf course, I'm very aware of that fact. But it is designed to minimize system calls exactly because they can add significant overhead.