On Friday, 4 December 1998,
     MARIO SEMO wrote to IVAN TODOROSKI about Guess who's back... ;)

 IT>>   Also, Process Commander does NOT do "who knows
what". The way it
 IT>> changes other process' priority is totaly documented and supported by
 IT>> the OS/2 API. It is a simple DosSetPriority() call. Don't see

 MS> wasn't it PC who added a second thread to EACH application in the
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 MS> system? or something else added to the system with WARP4. at least

   Hey?! That's EXACTLY what I'm seeing here! You think PC did that? I
   never bothered to check it without PC, but as you (and others) say
   that they haven't seen such a thing on their machines, I believe you.

    I stand corrected... It seems that there IS a certain amount of
    black magic involved after all. It really does "who knows what". :)

 MS> every and each app in the system has (under WARP4) one thread more
 MS> then under WARP3. i name this "do who knowns what". ( as i reember
 MS> it was the application which was previously (under OS2 3.x) called
 MS> WatchCat. isnt this PC today?).

  Well it must be, because I used WatchCat prior to PC, and couldn't
  help noticing that they are ALMOST IDENTICAL (the ctrl-alt-del part,
  anyway).

 MS> and WHAT threads are changed when PC calls DosSetPriority? my App has 16
 MS> threads. each with different priorities. some idle, some TC.

  Well I did figure out this one. If you tell PC to change the priority
  of a PROCESS (i.e. you don't specify a particular thread), it only
  changes the priority of the main thread (tid 1). If you specify a
  particular thread within a process, then it changes only the one you
  specified.

   It has some command line utils to do this. I use

      normal +0 pmshell.12

  will (try to) set the 12th thread of each instance of pmshell to
  regular, delta 0. It will fail on the first instance, and succed on
  the second.

 IT>>     Take any DOS assembler (even DEBUG will do) and create a simple
 IT>> program (.COM or .EXE, no matter) with this piece of code in it:

 IT>>      cli
 IT>>      x:
 IT>>      jmp x

 IT>>     Execute this in a DOS window.

 MS> mh. at moment not the time to test it (just in case), but as i
 MS> remember it doesnt crash my system with WARP4 as i tested it long
 MS> ago. But it DEFINITLY crash any OS2 2.x system. (simple because
 MS> cli was not virtualized and so really clears the interrupt
 MS> enable).

 MS> Have you tested this with WARP4?

   Yep... frozed it solid. But as Mike explained, this is because of my
   shoddy hardware. If my chipset and CPU had the capability to
   virtualize interrupts, OS/2 would have detected this and used it.

 MS> But anyhow, this is COMPLETLY unrelated to ThreadPriorities. even
 MS> if it kills the system, the one and only reason is, that cli is
 MS> not virtualized.

   :) I know, I know... I even put a little disclaimer with exclamation
   marks that this was only a side note, in no way related to the
   discussion of priorities, but it got edited out during the
   subsequent quoting.

  Anyway, you're quite right, we are seriously starting to drift
  off-topic...

                                                            - Ivan -

.!. REAL programmers use undocumented calls...
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