On 10/13/2011 12:55, andrel wrote:
> So that moves the question to: why is the ctrl-alt-del handler paged out?

How much of it do you want to keep in core? I've had very little trouble 
getting the CAD handler to come up in things like Vista, but the next step 
of picking something off the menu can cause a new program to get launched. 
However, it launches task manager or some such in XP, I forget.

> And the UI: why has that to be on the GUI, with all the page faults that may
> result from swapping pixels to disk? Remember we are sending a low level
> high importance interrupt and the user knows that.

Well, yes. That gets handled right away, most likely. Then it has to *do* 
something in response. I'm not sure what your point is. Your keystroke is of 
course taken into the kernel pretty much immediately. It's the thing that 
comes after I'm talking about.

> I know. I am just asking if there is still a reason to handle the kernel
> like any other user process.

The problem is not in the kernel's response. It's the fact that the 
complaint is the task manager takes a long time to come up, preventing you 
from killing the task.

In UNIX terms, it's like complaining that /bin/kill takes a long time to 
load when the system is thrashing, and you asking why the kill() kernel trap 
would be paged out in the first place.

> But, is there any reason to stop the entire kernel because of a disk seek?

No. Nor does that happen. Otherwise, disk seeks wouldn't continue to get in 
the way?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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