OSDev.org

Hi everyone,

A slideshow presentation has been created on how the process queue works in BareMetal OS. If you have 3 minutes please take a look and tell me what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19NW8iPM3X4

The graphics are really nice, and definitely effective. Just a couple comments: you should try to scale up the text in the sample C code, because it's unreadable with YouTube compression, and you should remove the cross-dissolves between label text blocks during the graphic parts, because they are unreadable during that transition (I would recommend a fast dissolve out then a fast dissolve in instead of a slow cross-dissolve.)

I must say I was impressed by the simplicity of your multitasking. Just one question, when there are say 20 workloads and but two processors. Do the last 2 have to wait for the first 18 to be finished or are they also dynamically put back on the queue after n amount of time? Also, why do you kill the CLI, is it/will it not (be) possible to background processes?

Ferrarius wrote:I must say I was impressed by the simplicity of your multitasking. Just one question, when there are say 20 workloads and but two processors. Do the last 2 have to wait for the first 18 to be finished or are they also dynamically put back on the queue after n amount of time? Also, why do you kill the CLI, is it/will it not (be) possible to background processes?

They have to wait, in a mainframe-like fashion. From this page of the website, it reads...

Monotasking
The philosophy behind BareMetal OS is to run one application at a time. Multitasking adds complexity to the overall system as well as degraded performance due to the protection mechanisms necessary in a multitasking system. While BareMetal OS is a mono-tasking system it does allow for multiprocessing to submit sub-tasks to other available CPUs.

The idea behind BareMetal is to have software running as close to the bare met... hardware as possible, achieving maximum performance and hardware availability at the detriment of high-level features like pre-emptive multitasking.
I think I saw the author writing about render farms as one of the possible applications.

Here is an updated version on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/13423853

The resolution while watching online still isn't the greatest (The original is 1024 x 768) but Vimeo allows you to download the original.