Yes, all this. However: > You may have noticed in the past that context switches are slow I'm not sure that the situation has improved. In many ways it is g

Yes, all this. However: > You may have noticed in the past that context switches are slow I'm not sure that the situation has improved. In many ways it is getting worse. TLBs are growing much, much, much more slowly than L2/L3 cache sizes. This is mainly because on-chip wire delay isn't dropping as quickly as transistor density is rising -- coupling capacitance in densly-wired areas has become a much bigger problem over the last decade. The TLB has to run at the same clock rate as the register file, but it is much larger (both in terms of bits and in terms of geometry). > But with Java you could at least theoretically do it Or with a memory-safe, non-garbage-collected language. Hopefully someday we'll have more than one of these. These languages are the final nail in the coffin of microkernels.