On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 08:43:03PM -0500, Chuck Cranor wrote:

 > i had a chat with chuck silvers a couple of months ago, and our thoughts
 > were that we could get by without always using the reaper.   (it seems 
 > like an extra step on the process life time critical path.)    the idea 
 > was that if you've got another process ready to run you should switch to 
 > it, then free the final stuff from that process' context (rather than
 > bringing the extra overhead of a third process [reaper] into the picture).

Yes, that could be done.  However, that means that the unsuspecting
process can be charged for time accumulated by reaping the process,
not necessarily something you want (or, it could block, and if it's
a very high priority process, you don't want that, either).

Another nice thing about the reaper is that it can be made into a
very low priority thread, effectively creating a pool of contexts
that can be re-used at thread creation time ... this is something
that Solaris does, although our reaper does not (yet).

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>