Talk:Software lockout

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[edit] Musty

There's several things about this article which strike me as a bit iffy, but I'm not a computer scientist so I don't want to start chopping away.

1. The references to "idle wait" in kernel-level critical sections. I don't know of any architecture that does this; spinlocks ie. "busy waits" are standard in kernel space.
2. "Typical values for L/E range from 0.01 to 0.1." The reference for this statement is from 1968! By a conservative estimate, computers have gotten at least a billion times faster since then.
3. The article treats the hardware itself as being contention-free, suggesting an overly theoretical bias; in practice hardware-level contention has informed the development of Linux and presumably other multi-threaded kernels.
4. "Software lockout is the major cause of scalability degradation in a multiprocessor system"--if this were true we could just run a distinct kernel image on each processor of a NUMA system, consider the problem solved, and take the rest of the day off to play golf.

--192.68.228.4 23:23, 4 September 2007 (UTC)