Re: page faults

[Marcus Sundberg <erammsu@kieraypc01.p.y.ki.era.ericsson.se>]

"William J. Earl" <wje@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com> writes:

> Eric W. Biederman writes:
> ...
>  > If the hardware cannot support two processors hitting the region simultaneously,
>  > (support would be worst case the graphics would look strange)
>  > you could have problems.
> ...
>       One could reasonably take the view that a threads-aware graphics library
> should be thread-safe.  That is, if the hardware needs to have concurrent
> threads in a single process serialize access to the hardware, then the 
> library plugin for that hardware should do the required serialization.
> 
>       This of course the neglects the question of whether a broken
> user-mode program could damage the hardware, but then a broken
> single-threaded user-mode program, with no other programs using the
> hardware, could just as easily damage the hardware.  That is, if the
> hardware is not safe for direct access in general, threading does not
> make it any less safe.

The hardware _is_ safe for direct access, but _not_ while the
accelerator is running.

//Marcus
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        Marcus Sundberg        | http://www.stacken.kth.se/~mackan/
 Royal Institute of Technology |       Phone: +46 707 295404
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