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List:       kde-women
Subject:    Re: [Kde-women]Object Oriented Programming and Linux
From:       Eva Brucherseifer <eva () rt ! e-technik ! tu-darmstadt ! de>
Date:       2001-03-05 9:10:44
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Hi Aly,

welcome to the list :-)

>
> Anyway, I thought I might take a minor deviation and discuss the kernel a
> bit.  I am trying to really get a solid grasp of the kernel.  Does anyone
> out there have an idea why the current kernel 2.4 continues to use the 386
> process management or am I mistaken in this aspect?
>

Well, I am not too much into the kernel, since I usually work more on the 
application level. But as far as I know they changed the memory management in 
the 2.4 kernel towards a reuse of memory, if e.g. an app like netscape is 
opened two times. If you are interested in these, I can give you the material 
of a talk of Rik van Rijl from the last Linuxtag in Germany. He codes the 
memory stuff.
But what would you like to see changed in process management? You can't  
change the API since then most of the apps will not run anymore. Regarding 
the CPU, you can compile a pentium optimized version. Unfortunately there 
isn't a AMD optimized version, but the pentium version works as well. The 
kernel supports quite a number of different processerors, so I suppose, the 
386-686 simpy didn't change very much. So maybe the main problem is, that 
Intel and AMD still try to be compatible to the 386 on the processor side... 
Actually there are much better CPU architectures than the pentium one ;-)

I am not sure if I got your question right, so I hope, my thoughts are not 
off-topic ;-)

Cheers,
eva

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