From: Tony Williams 

Antti Kurenniemi wrote:
> "Tony Williams"  wrote in message
> news:4376618f$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>>>(in case you missed it, I was somewhat trying to point out the
"so what"
>>>factor of the cpu cycle counts. Really, so what?)
>>
>>It's a big deal for real time systems. Think in terms of a context switch
>>triggered by an interrupt handler and 2ms is a *long* time.
>
>
> Why would a real time system keep spawning new processes, instead of running
> one that it can control fully?

Real time systems multitask too, and if you're short on memory it can make
sense to shut down processes when they're idle to free up resources. If you
do everything in one process then you've taken over the kernel's job of
scheduling and are right back where you started.

Some systems work like that, using a microkernel to control some things and
having the "main" OS run in a single high priority process which
controls user-level applications.

Faster process/thread statup times make starting and stopping processes in
response to real-time events a workable strategy. It's all about giving
yourself more options.

--
Tony

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