[MLton-devel] Kernel Mode Linux (KML)

Henry Cejtin henry@sourcelight.com
Mon, 29 Apr 2002 16:08:18 -0500


I  saw  this  a  while  ago.   Note, it really is basically a joke.  Even the
claims `faster than ordinary system calls  in  an  order  of  magnitude',  in
addition  to  being grammatically incorrect, are misleading.  It is true that
the overhead of a procedure call vs. a system call is about a factor  of  10,
but unless the system call does almost nothing, it doesn't effect performance
by any significant amount.

As to could we port to it, it would certainly not be trivial.  A kernel space
thread  does  not  control  the  memory mapping it sees.  There are no really
effective ways of getting large continuous blocks of memory.   Some  of  this
has,  I  remember  reading,  gotten  a bit better in the 2.4 kernels, but not
much.  In the 2.2 kernels, even getting 2 adjacent pages was  hard  (although
do-able).  Thus you have to get memory in 4K chunks.

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