Back to the main page

Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: "David M Girardot (Girardot, David)" <GIRARDOT@********>
Subject: Robert's Question about Multitasking
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 92 11:16:16 edt
Robert, IMHO, not without a lot of nuyen. First of all, you'd need at least
3 encephalons, I would think. One handles normal input, another handle's
extra input, and the third coodinates the other two. Now, you'd probably say
that I/O SPU's ought to be able to handle this, but I really think not: I
don't think they're powerful enough. Additionally, onto two of the
Encephalon's there ought to be at least 2 SPU's each, one data management (>a
buffer) and one I/O (think of it as a 16550a UART).

On the other hand, you could do a similar thing with less nuyen. That would
be just 2 SPUs (data and IO) and some memory. You could "offload" active
tasks to this "buffer" and pick up on them later. (Kind of like swapping to
disk)...

IMHO this kind of thing would be tres useful for Corp types, and even mages.
Just think, you could offload an enchanting task to mem and take that phone
call...

--David
Message no. 2
From: Robert Hayden <rahayden@*****.WEEG.UIOWA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Robert's Question about Multitasking
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 92 17:14:08 CET
On Mon, 5 Oct 1992, David M Girardot (Girardot, David) wrote:

>
>
>
> Robert, IMHO, not without a lot of nuyen. First of all, you'd need at least
> 3 encephalons, I would think. One handles normal input, another handle's
> extra input, and the third coodinates the other two. Now, you'd probably say
> that I/O SPU's ought to be able to handle this, but I really think not: I
> don't think they're powerful enough. Additionally, onto two of the
> Encephalon's there ought to be at least 2 SPU's each, one data management (>a
> buffer) and one I/O (think of it as a 16550a UART).
>
> On the other hand, you could do a similar thing with less nuyen. That would
> be just 2 SPUs (data and IO) and some memory. You could "offload" active
> tasks to this "buffer" and pick up on them later. (Kind of like swapping
to
> disk)...
>

Hmmm, I guess I didn't see it that way. let me try to draw a picture




------------ -----------
| Datajack | --> | I/O SPU | --------------
------------ ----------- \
\
------------ ----------- \ --------------
| Datajack | --> | I/O SPU | ---------------------> | Encephalon |
------------ ----------- / --------------
/
------------ ----------- /
| Datajack | --> | I/O SPU | --------------
------------ -----------

What I say is each I/O SPU acting as a FIFO buffer in addition. I would
thing the Encephalon would be spart enough to either multitask or
task-switch the I/O. Of course, the more Datajacks you have, the more
memory you have to have dedicated for each process.

For shits and giggles lets try this:

1 datajack: No dedicated memory
2 datajacks: 50 mp dedicated
3 datajacks: 100 mp dedicated
etc...


What that memory is is only accessible by the encephalon's CPU and
facilitates the extra processes that would be required to handle the
additional I/O.



> IMHO this kind of thing would be tres useful for Corp types, and even mages.
> Just think, you could offload an enchanting task to mem and take that phone
> call...

Or with a little bit of work, you could have 4 or 5 processes running and
drastically cut the programming time for all decking related programming :)


>
> --David

and Robert

Further Reading

If you enjoyed reading about Robert's Question about Multitasking, you may also be interested in:

Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!