Protected Mode vs. Unreal Mode

[Open Source 69]

Dear Folks,
Hello.  Does anyone have any opinions regarding whether protected mode or unreal mode faster?  Clearly, less overhead is produced with unreal mode, but are there general speed improvements in using 32-bit code instead of 16-bit code with 32-bit addressing (the Intel optimization manuals seem to suggest 32-bit code is faster, but they may not be considering unreal mode)?  Are there any reasons specific to SMP kernels to prefer protected mode?  The kernel I am writing is dedicated to a specific application, so a general purpose protected mode application/kernel split does not seem particularly applicable (currently I am using unreal mode).  Thank you very much for any information that you can provide on this subject and please have a nice day.
Sincerely,
[email protected]

[Ranieri]

The speed really depends on your CPU.
It is my understanding that on anything higher than a pentium real/unreal mode code executes CONSIDERABLY slower than pm code.

If you are writing soemthing for a specific app, then i suggest you just cram everything in pm CPL0 and be done with it.