On Saturday, 10 March 2012 at 16:22:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
OK, clearly I wasn't understanding what the OP was talking
about. It
*seemed* to imply that Linux had stop-the-world problems with
mouse
movement, but this isn't the case.
A hardware interrupt is a hardware interrupt. Whatever OS
you're using,
it's got to stop to handle this somehow. I don't see how else
you can do
this. When the hardware needs to signal the OS about something,
it's
gotta do it somehow. And hardware often requires top-priority
stop-the-world handling, because it may not be able to wait a
few
milliseconds before it's handled. It's not like software that
generally
can afford to wait for a period of time.
As for Win95 being unable to keep up with mouse movement...
well, to be
honest I hated Win95 so much that 90% of the time I was in the
DOS
prompt anyway, so I didn't even notice this. If it were truly a
problem,
it's probably a sign of poor hardware interrupt handling
(interrupt
handler is taking too long to process events). But I haven't
seen this
myself either.
Design of input handling, the theoretical part is irrelevant. I
was solely talking about how they do it in practice. OSs are
simply unresponsive and in linux it is more severe. If i am
having this issue in practice it doesn't matter if it was the GC
lock or an another failure to handle input.
